Carmen Calvo

In the 1970s Carmen Calvo embarked on one of the most personal journeys in Spanish art. Thanks to her training in fine arts and in the world of pottery, she has known how to subvert codes and treat clay as if it was painting or sculpture. Fascinated by archaeology, she organises small moulds or assorted objects in the same way that archaeologists or shopkeepers set out their finds or merchandise. On the other hand, her shelf collections consist of plaster forms extracted from cardboard moulds, forms whose austere aesthetics hark back to Morandi.

Her photographs manipulated with objects or paint constitute a lucid social critique of the closed society of post-war Spain, its repressive institutions and its moral straitjackets. Childhood is a recurring motif for her and in this exhibition her final piece alludes to an episode of child abuse that occurred in the 1990s.

Ever since she discovered the Louvre Museum and its archaeological collections, Carmen Calvo has been fascinated by the way objects are situated, ordered and displayed. For this reason, she likes to arrange objects she has found, metal moulds and personal mementos on canvases, attached with wire or twine, as if they were exvotos. She sometimes also lays them out on tables or in cabinets as imaginary ruins. In her Shelving Units, she gathers together plaster shapes obtained from cardboard moulds or boxes and the result is a series of sober geometric blocks reminiscent of constructivist compositions. The gaze and its absence is another recurring theme in Calvo’s work: she collects glass eyes and often hides the eyes in her works under paint or various types of masks – the artist’s vision and the blindness of the alienated man or woman.

Carmen Calvo took advantage of the months of the pandemic lockdown to re-watch some of the films that influenced the development of the imagery in her work. In those days of loneliness and enforced seclusion, the artist captured fragments of scenes, moments and faces that became frozen in time after tapping the shutter button on her mobile phone. This string of ghostly stills, projected in the dark, tells a story that reflects the sense of claustrophobia and unease caused by that isolation. It’s Not a Dream! It’s Really Happening! is the title of this collage film, which is accompanied by the rustling of paper recorded while unpacking the installation A Cage to Live in.

Since its origins in Europe in the 19th century, the postcard has played an important role in the transmission of heritage because it has been used to reproduce works of art. An object of interest that has fascinated the curious, collectors and artists, the postcard has been the object of playful and transgressive manipulations, on the part of Futurism and Surrealism, and in current artistic trends as well. In 2018 Carmen Calvo produced a series of modified postcards, The Time We Will Fall in Love With, which she has completed with postcards from the Picasso Museum. Image after image, the stories are repeated to define a very personal phantasmagoria, with its own games, retinues and displays of affection, gestures and moments of enthusiasm, dances, laughter and adventures. A world that thus bridges light and darkness, cruelty and tenderness. “Loyal messenger of love or friendship”, in the words of Paul Éluard, the postcard is already part of our everyday lives.

Carmen Calvo provides us with a deeply critical account of post-war Spain, up till around the 1960s. This was a country dominated by Franco’s dictatorship, by the authority of the Catholic Church and strict moral rules that had to be obeyed. Because of the terrible hardship devastating the country, many people, especially from rural areas, migrated to the big cities. Education was strict, single-gender and based on rote learning methods. There was no freedom of expression and women had to submit to their fathers or husbands. In order to underscore the depersonalization and alienation of the common people, Carmen Calvo presents us with negative images of those times, going so far as to paint over the eyes or the whole face of her protagonists. Boys and girls are a recurring theme in her work: in their school uniforms, as altar boys, as victims of a system of oppressive laws, or as the targets of sexual and psychological abuse.

Since her beginnings, Carmen Calvo has metaphorically explored feelings, desire and repression in her oeuvre. Her feminism has never been explicit or programmatic, but it has subtly and ironically denounced the roles traditionally ascribed to women. The theme of the mannequins was frequently explored by Surrealist artists, not only through their manipulation but also as something close to the idea of a dismembered body. Here, the three mannequins are female bodies where only the torso and legs can be seen. They can be considered as victims of aggression or as physical allusions to erotic games among women. On the other hand, the work Fontainebleau is an allusion to the famous painting Gabrielle d’Estrées et une de ses sœurs, from the Fontainebleau school, which brought sensuality and lightness to 16th-century French art and has always been interpreted as an example of female eroticism. Here, the beautiful aristocratic ladies are turned into headless dolls that hold hands.

The piece A Cage to Live in is based on a true event that happened in 1997, which Carmen Calvo read about in a newspaper: a seven-year-old girl had been shut up in a kind of cage for weeks. Carmen Calvo recreates this story by filling a white room with dolls, stuffed animals and other children’s playthings that can only be seen through holes in the walls of the box. In this way, the spectator becomes a voyeur, like in Marcel Duchamp’s work Étant donnés (1946-1966), where the fragmented body of a woman could be glimpsed stretched out on some grass and holding a gas lamp. Inside the box, a male adolescent mannequin can also be seen, his face covered by a black mask and whom we sense may be the abuser. The drama of the scene is accentuated by the doll’s voice uttering a pitiful “I’m hungry”. The box is accompanied by drawings that depict mutilated children, crying or even dripping with blood. A work that denounces a blight on society.