Melanie Carvalho

About

For Melanie Carvalho depth is not just an illusory strategy, but of psychological significance too. Caves, passages, reflections, faraway horizons and receding, repeating ornamental patterns have all featured in her recent work. Each device is meant as a challenge, and as an invitation. These are places in which to drift or to get lost, and an inky black cave is as much a path to psychically inhabit these spaces as it is a warning to keep away. Carvalho's paintings don't solely try to represent landscapes however; they are landscapes. By taking direction from the restless reservoirs, estuaries and accretions of the paint, Carvalho maps her own micro-terrains, in which the processes of erosion, flow, fracture and fission combine with the drifts and journeys of the mind. Thin washes of paint, soaking through and staining the canvas in a way that for Modernists such as Morris Louis was synonymous with flatness, are here commensurable with inky depths through which we can imagine ourselves sinking.