Text for the exhibition "Colónia de Férias" at BOUTIQUE – Raum für temporäre Kunst in April 2013.
By Luís Albuquerque Pinho and Luís Pinto Nunes


COLÓNIA DE FÉRIAS 

Mesmerising shiny surfaces, Shifts in spaces, Monochromatic blue, and Rough DEDCA dry typesets.
Colónia de Férias [Summer Camp] is the title of this exhibition, and simultaneously the translation to portuguese of the name of the city where it takes place [Köln]. This pun assaults us with the feeling of a vacant vacation, with mistaken meanings, playing along with the shift of realities where you can recognise the sun, the beach, road trips, travels and islands, extracted from an unlikely parallel reality. These are designed to their utter most perfection. Swimming pools, the obliteration of objects, walls, corners — the power to create new spaces and meanings with different objects and materials. It all seems apparently easy and effortless due to its pristine substantiation.

In Diana Carvalho’s work process, the atelier can be seen as a space, as an Indesign page, ultimately as a space for exhibition. Everything seems to be arranged in a proper manner. Everything looks like it is snapped to a grid and a stage for the assembly of new already made works, previously tried out by Diana Carvalho at her atelier. The repetition of the same artwork, the same object or installation is made differently from its previous attempts. This method leeds the artist to create new artworks, but one cannot consider them to be new or different from the ones she had done before, as they are subjected to continual changes. First of all it is installed in her atelier eventually to be re-made at a museum space. The action inscribes them with different relations between the space and their own shape and appearance, but they are still inherent to their own original intention.

Some of the elements become constant on her work; their shapes, colours and ideas tend to be seen as a work series, although they are not accomplished or finished. One can say that the creases and crinkles seem to be enhanced by the process, where repetition becomes quintessential since it is a repetition on itself. When talking about creases, one is immediately induced to the media of paper, as Diana Carvalho says: “when thinking of a book, I will have to take on that everything resumes to paper and ink, and that the objects will be made out of images and text”. The book is torn apart, unassembled.

After pulling different images and dwelling with her own visual universe, these image are organized according to specific chapters and become the kick off of her installations comprising of postcards, photographs, xerox prints, objects usually composed by paper — volatile and ephemeral. Working with the two-dimensional —the image itself— the artist tries to create links between objects, acting as layers, naming them. Swimming pools, Antennas and Postcard collections. Rehearsing layouts in this so called Indesign page, manipulating space, shifting its mood, colour and ambience. Camouflage, passage, repetition, displacements, shine and light, are some of the words used by the artist to describe the themes stressed on her work.