Following the conclusion of his major exhibition at the IVAM and whilst on her way to her retrospective at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, Carmen Calvo returns to our gallery to present *La habitación de al lado*, a project from a new production, which covers the three first rooms of our main space, offering a tour through its unique perspective.
On this occasion, the artist surprises us with a subtly autobiographical work, which takes on particular significance in *Oro y redondo: del mediodía!* – an installation through which she recalls a family tradition, in which, together with her father, she would dry orange peels in the sun before throwing them into the fire in the cauldron to fill the home with fragrance. By recreating a large clothesline within one of the galleries—where organic matter plays an essential role in determining the piece’s capacity for transformation over the course of several days—Carmen Calvo gives shape to a childhood memory in a way that is both tangible and ephemeral.
Memory is, without a doubt, what lies at the heart of her prolific body of work, approached from an experimental perspective that is ever-evolving and in a state of constant flux. Drawing on an archaeological perspective on objects and images, the artist appropriates these ‘archives’, deconstructs them, reinterprets them and reconstructs them to create her own language and an unmistakable signature, establishing a robust discourse on universal themes such as religion, education, love and sex. As an heir to Surrealism, her works bring together the inherent power of objects and a fundamental call for the viewer to adopt a critical perspective.
As Rafael Gil* puts it, “Carmen Calvo leaves the materials to the viewer’s imagination; it is up to the viewer to discover the meaning of her work. The artist brings these expressions up to date through her personal vision of the present, her thoughts, her concerns and her anxieties – those shared by all human beings – which Calvo transforms into inspiring works of art with great evocative power. Her work is rich in nuance; it is a constant quest to find herself, the complexity of which lies not so much in uncovering its precise meaning as in allowing oneself to be captivated by the interplay of her images…”
Guided by her intuitions and the very impulse of life itself, Calvo constructs in this exhibition an atlas of possible memories, in which the image serves as the main thread guiding us through an intimate narrative, revealing – as in all her work – the experience of the present and the construction of memory as an anthropological, collective, critical and existential phenomenon.
* Rafael Gil, Carmen Calvo: Thinking about painting. Julio González Prize 2022. IVAM p.153.