Toronto Critic’s Pick: Jennifer Carvalho at Franz Kaka

Carvalho’s small-to-medium-sized works (all 2024) comprise references to old-master paintings by artists including Giotto di Bondone, Jan van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden. The imagery—praying hands, huddled figures, a finger marking a place in a tome—is steeped in Christian iconography of the early renaissance. Carvalho’s paintings are so dense with religious connotation that you find yourself thinking you can smell incense, hear a distant choir, detect the scuffle of shoes on a stone floor. Devout emotions run high: in three works, saintly women shed not just one tear but shining floods of them. (Carvalho is particularly interested in the time when painters began to depict grief—mostly through women weeping for Jesus.)

With their combinations of art-historical references, compositions such as Flying figures with garden, floral motif, and frame (2024) are evidently of Carvalho’s own invention. Yet even those works that appear to be direct replicas of existing paintings, are rendered distinctly the artist’s own through her approach to texture. The oil paint appears to have been applied dry, or at least with very little solvent. The surface looks as though layers of paint have been scraped away, added back, then rubbed off again—like a fresco that’s been restored over and over.

One might wonder what a contemporary painter such as Carvalho sees in historical works or, more specifically, why she chose to focus on certain details in these paintings? The reflective jewels and pearls in the close-cropped From gold to brush (study of optics and splendour)—each executed with meticulous attention to light and form—suggest it might be about the quiet pleasure of rendering something intricate. Here, it seems, the joy of painting is alive and well. These are painter’s paintings, made by an artist looking down the barrel of the canon and showing us what she likes best. —[O]

Jennifer Carvalho’s exhibition Ghost at Franz Kaka, Toronto, runs from 13 September to 12 October 2024.

Main image: Jennifer Carvalho, An archive of gestures (hands and architecture with domestic interior) (2024). Oil on canvas. 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto. Photo: LFdocumentation.