Carmen Calvo
Valencia, 1950 

Carmen Calvo has made a creative exploration of the world of objects, and her work is an ongoing dialogue with the evocative power of things and the desire to capture them and make them timeless. He language became defined with a profile of its own in the seventies, when she made an important transition from painting to relief, later moving to assemblage and three-dimensional sculpture.

One of her first series was Paisajes (Landscapes), which included Serie Paisajes (Recopilación) (Landscapes [Compilation]), in which she began to stick fragments of real objects, such as paintbrushes, paint tubes or, as in this picture, small rolls of clay that create a landscape image by the varying density of their accumulation. Here the rolls of clay are equivalent in body and thickness to brushstrokes defining a landscape with a low horizon and sandy colour. The landscape is indebted to Van Gogh’s clearly differentiated, lively brushstrokes, which become signs and graphic patterns and which Calvo found so interesting because of their possibilities as cursive lines and even as writing within the context of painting. Relating clay with writing through graphic patterns is something that links up with her interest in archaeology and ancient systems of writing on clay tablets. In the series Escrituras (Writings), begun in 1980, Calvo developed what was still only intuition in the small clay signs we see here. Also, in the Valencian landscape tradition that is closest to her, clay might be associated with the landscapes of Francisco Lozano, where one can clearly see the potential energy acquired by a brushstroke with its various orientations that define the topography of what is represented. As the title indicates, Serie Paisajes (Recopilación) implies a “compilation” or accumulation, which is one of the processes practised by Carmen Calvo in her subsequent work, whether she is working with fragments of pottery, palettes, bits of glass or some other object. Serie Paletas (Recopilación) (Palette Series [Compilation]) shares this particular instinct for classifying objects that is characteristic of Carmen Calvo’s work. In this diptych, the palettes and fragments are attached to the surface, preserving all the two-dimensional nature of painting. They are clearly distanced, and each piece occupies a place and is arranged in accordance with a taxonomic aim: it is a question of arranging in order to recognise and retain fragments of time, paralysing and decontextualising them. The fragemented palettes have lost not only their physical integrity but also their function as aids for painting, and have become lyrical geometrical forms. There is an implicit need for reflection on painting and its possibility, which was also present in the use of tubes and broken brushes. This work was made during the period that Carmen Calvo spent in Paris between 1985 and 1992: a time of constant encounter with the archaeology rooms in the Louvre, where the idea came for assemblages of objects like clusters of cultural vestiges from urban environments. On a larger scale, extending like a veritable environmental setting, En el centro is a set of shelves crammed with a wide variety of objects connected with studio activity, but also with many others occupations announced by the more undefined presence of certain objects. Many are the shapes made out of various materials as substitutes for real objects. The accumulative instinct here makes a mighty attempt to blend the intimacy of the object with very visible exhibition, although in an apparently disordered fashion. A relationship might be established with a whole range of object art, from the “Merz” works of Schwitters to installations of objects on shelves such as Wirtschaftswerte (Financial Values), by Beuys, not forgetting Louise Nevelson or the accumulations of César and Arman.

Carmen Bernárdez, The Collection of IVAM. Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, 2001, pages 440 – 443.