CAROLINA PIMENTA

Pamela Weissenberg presents the first solo exhibition of the Portuguese artist Carolina Pimenta (Porto, 1988) in Mexico, who, after living in New York for 5 years, currently lives and works between Mexico City and Lisbon.

This exhibition acts as a dialogue between her most recent photographic series “After the Image (Depois da Imagem)”, conceived from a study of colour and light theory through experimentation and error and two large photographs that evoke atmospheric landscapes. The latter series entitled “En Plein Air” (2022) is a nod to the French Impressionist movement and grew out of research that extends from the field of body/ culture to her early photographs centred on nature/culture. This series of bucolic scenes is also a result of affections stemming from Pimenta’s immediate reality since the pandemic’s irremediable impact on our psyche, routines and worldviews.

Paul Klee wrote, “Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.” And before him, Goethe maintained that “colours are light’s suffering and joy.” The German writer, who connected nature, science and poetry, demonstrated in 1810 that colour arises through the interaction between light and darkness by mistakenly opening a roll of film in a room not suitable for development. The captured images faded and then disappeared, becoming solely colour.

Unlike Turner, Monet, Kandinsky or even the American colour field painter Helen Frankenthaler, whose work was unjustly eclipsed by her marriage to Robert Motherwell, Carolina Pimenta’s works are not emotional landscapes or subjective visions of an external reality. Her darkroom experiments achieve the alchemy of transfiguring images photographed, capturing the essence of matter and the poetics of human technique. The shades and gradations of yellow, orange, red, pink or violet printed on the texture of the paper evoke different emotions in the viewers, affecting them physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Revealing while concealing, rising from darkness to light, permitting failures and chance; to integrate error into the work is at the very origin of photography when Daguerre, using a silver spoon on a metal plate treated with iodine, beheld the image clearly printed on the iodized surface. Artists like Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, and all those who seek to discover new artistic territories have followed. Similarly, Carolina Pimenta seeks to approach the materiality of painting through her photography, exploring and experimenting with new techniques and methods.

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