Carmen Calvo, Mixed Media, Spain “Untitled”, 2006

In their stores, as archaeologists who classified the tiny traces of civilizations, Carmen Calvo, three years ago, when I met her at her Casa de Velázquez workshop, patiently added series of signs. It is about those insignificant remains that can be occasionally collected in the street or fragments of clay shaped by her own fingers. Thus, was developing in indecipherable writings, sequences of enigmatic speeches without beginning or end. She seemed to be playing. She was increasingly dominating her hand better. But in the background of seemingly playful exercise, an essential reference was revealed. To Van Gogh, to his way of painting, and specially drawing, juxtaposing brushstroke or trait, each of which, isolated, could easily partake in Carmen Calvo´s sets, whose most vivid desire was, while she got used to dominating space, to evoke, as in a palimpsest, behind the lines of those parodies of indecipherable books, the structures of huge extensions of the earth.

The artist arrived at Paris. She settled, not without difficulty, at the City of Arts, facing the Seine. With a whole new light, vibrations under the arches of Pont Marie fascinated her as much as the force acquired by trunks of the large trees at Ile de France. She undoubtedly did not give up grinding clay, multiplying tracks and incisions, ordering them in long series of tiny formats as if they were pages of a private diary. However, the whole work changes under the influence of Parisian transplantation. Through a sudden explosion first, for the sake of broad gesture, by the will of erecting monumental forms, of representing, this time deliberately, vast tragic landscapes. Carmen Calvo is left today, to our great pleasure, to the pleasure of handling what Albert Skira called “the great palette”, of entrusting to the smooth, thick, generous outpouring of coloured matter the task of translating what moves her.

The irony does not disappear, and even less Van Gogh, in what he has of expressionist. But the game, the rigorous thoroughness and the scepticism of the early days, have allowed vigour to appear, affirmed to violence, of an admirable temperament. Feminine beyond all doubt: But of that robust femininity, unbreakable and fruitful that XII century moralists used as an example to drag men out of their inertia.”

Georges Duby
(Trans. A. Firpo).