A studio visit with Jennifer Carvalho

The most beautiful palette you've ever seen

Every inch of Jennifer Carvalho’s paintings are rendered with the same amount of detail. The paint is applied thickly but uniformly. This consistency greatly affects the viewer: it encourages a slow pan of the artwork, carefully considering the entire surface area of the work. When I visited Carvalho’s studio at the end of Summer, right before the paintings were en route to New York for her current show with Helena Anrather, it felt like walking into Sir John Soane’s Museum. Looking at the canvasses was the most unusual sensation, like my eyes were being massaged or bathed. It felt physically good to look at them. This happens rarely and, to me, is a sign of a near-perfect painting.

For the exhibition text, Claire Sammut aptly captures Carvalho’s practice:

In referencing Antiquity and Renaissance imagery culled from the pages of well-trod textbooks and web-sourced imagery, Carvalho’s practice is like art historical archaeology, combing through narrative passages of information and time gone by. Oddly cropped and collapsed into shallow spaces, her paintings are interpretations estranged from their origin, unconventional and phantasmic.

Phantasmic—it’s such an interesting word to describe Carvalho’s practice. At first, you think phantom. And then (if you’re me) fantastic. Both are very true of the paintings. The definition actually refers to the mythic, not real and existing within the imagination. Carvalho introduces the question: What does it mean when religious iconography, introduced and cemented as truth through image making, gets severed from its original source? A seed of doubt forms: what is said to be true is phantasmic. Through time, repetition, and cropping, Carvalho creates a new image that isn’t rooted in truth, but instead questioning and exploration.

Jennifer Carvalho’s exhibition, “Looking Perfectly Still,” is on view at Helena Anrather in NYC until December 22.