Carolina Martinez: No Lugar do Ar – Work.in.Process 3

No Lugar do Ar [In the Place of Air] integrates the third edition of the Work.in.Process project, where a guest artist shares part of his creative process in the second floor of the gallery. Carolina Martinez (b. 1985, Rio de Janeiro) chose to display finished works, studies and works that are still in process. The exhibition comprises paintings from Carolina’s “Perímetros” [Perimeters] research and a series of installations in which the artist reflect about emptiness.

The artist began to work on the “Perímetros” series in 2014, in her studio at Fábrica Behring. The series comprises wooden plates with paintings of corners, with insertion of three-dimensional elements – thin wood sticks that surpass the limits of the painted planes, suggesting an imaginary perimeter and completing in a way the emptiness of the painting. The artist’s obsession with empty spaces and unusual perspectives present in this series are recurrent in her aesthetical and conceptual development and relates to her graduation in Architecture. 

The occupation No Lugar do Ar also displays a series of installations that the artist has been creating since 2013, when she was in an artistic residency in New York City. The point of departure for such site specific works is of course the architecture that will house them, which is displaced and re-signified. In the beginning of 2015, this series originated the installation “Rodapés Mutantes” [Mutant Footers], that so far had only been tested in her studio and is displayed for the public for the first time at Emma Thomas: an installation with sections of footers installed on corners and walls according to the characteristics of each exhibition space.