My body of work consists of various interconnected series where I explore the relationship between the will of the body and accident. It is during this connection, this interlude, that my objects are produced. A space opens up that is assumed to be experimental, a kind of game in the search for form, where answers are first manipulated and then perceived through observation. It’s something akin to a precipice, which ensures a shift in perspective and, consequently, the movement of the body towards more forms, which in turn bring more questions. The object that I apprehend is for me a receptacle of experiences that shape human existence. I observe the process, but also the surrounding reality and the body, accepting the answers and questions suggested in this game, which often are not perceived at first glance. Attention to the flesh is necessary.

In a home studio, the environment where I live and develop my research, these issues have been explored intensely and cathartically. The exhibition space comes afterwards, providing a reorganization of the work, an opening for more questions; inviting the audience to enter these receptacles, to play this game, and hopefully, to expand our fields of personal research.

Text by Pedro Arrifano published in the catalog of the exhibition “The Oscillating” held at the Ante-Sala and Salão da BASE, 2023.

What does a face conceal and reveal? Oscillations. Lack of stability, hesitation, insecurity? Carolina Rocha will say indeterminacy. All the oscillations that give name to each of the pieces exhibited are what cannot be determined. They are actually faces of indeterminacy or faces indeterminate by contexts and because one can never predict what the living will do. Not because it is mired in doubt, which paralyzes thought, but because the living is oscillating, does not decide immediately, has several possibilities of decision which makes this indeterminacy exciting, productive, quite different from being paralyzing.

The faces patented here are of agony, sadness, but are they? Aren’t they myths that live within us as a result of a society that instills these… fears in us from a young age? Aren’t we subject to myths throughout our lives? The external world as if it transforms into a projection of the inner world, and not as fiction, although also as fiction.

The contemporary human being has the clear sensation that the world – now clearly called the “external world” – can be the product of acts of will, of thought, of human language on the political and educational level, as the perception generalizes that the decisions of singular elements – which can be called subjects – construct the world.

What do we do with fear? Do we mask it? Do we hide? Do we transform? And if fear also comes disguised? Facified? Carolina shows various faces of this facified fear, fears that make us oscillate between perception and action resulting in a kind of vertigo as defined by Milan Kundera in the work “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”: “Vertigo is not the fear of falling, it is something else. It is the voice of the void beneath us that attracts and bewitches us, the desire to fall from which we defend ourselves afterwards with terror.” In the manifestation of an action that does not materialize, its substitute arises: an emotion that has degenerated. And there are so many degenerations that the artist exposes… there are so many fears that inhabit each being when they realize their unsustainability.

In a way, each piece is a mirror where we see ourselves. Painted in A4 and A3 format with India ink, acrylic paint, and gouache, each stroke made is a copy of what never happened, the chosen colors emerge mixed with promises that were never made in a society that seems like a canvas scribbling a horizon painted in light and shadow. That deliberate yellow, a mixture of joy with illness, is the veiled face in a whole of foreground oscillations that, in the repetition of being viewed, seem to lose human traits and have the strangest capacity – to de-individualize, de-communicate, and de-socialize the face. The foreground here is intensity.

Text by Pedro Arrifano published in the catalog of the exhibition “If I can’t touch, can I see?” held at the Ante-Sala and Salão da BASE, 2022.

“If I can’t touch, can I see?” is the title that Carolina Rocha attributes to her exhibition. A question that reveals the importance the artist gives to touch. Let’s think. If eventually I am not given the opportunity to touch the object in front of me, if that is forbidden to me, will I be able to grasp it, perceive it… realize that it is there?

The question holds a hint of irony. Indeed, in Carolina’s work, there is a place for what is not seen but “is there,” so to speak. She seeks to impress the viewer through extraordinary procedures. But she does so, like an Akróbatos (acrobat) which, from Latin, means to walk on tiptoe. It is discreet, not very noisy but leaves a trace… a trace that is worth following, just as the artist allows the beeswax in her mold-containers to dry out.

Intuition is the filter in this kind of dance between natural matter and artificial matter (the pigment she puts in the wax) and in the four macro photos that are a kind of x-ray of the drawings she produces. It is intuition that will account for the moving reality presented before the artist. A human form of thought that brings consciousness back to the inner duration of each individual.

Art is this experimentation or expression of singular reality. It is the flow of duration that constitutes the most intimate reality of all things. The artist does not intend to represent sensible forms, even though sometimes it may seem so. Carolina arranges means and techniques to express singularities and lead the viewer to also experience these singularities.

In a way, this exhibition deals with what we can abstract, that is, what separates, removes, subtracts. The world of agreements and recognitions does not appeal to her. It is directed towards accident, what happened but could not have happened. A controlled accident, which does not let itself be fatally injured. The work does not die in this accident, on the contrary, the accident is the cause of her works entering into process and living.

This accident that occurs is the result of chaos discharged into the medium the artist uses. A germ-catastrophe of rhythm, the principle of intensity, of sensation in the work. It is power/dynamism: a path to essence. Art fights with chaos, to make it sensible and the artist captures a piece of chaos, whether in a mold-container or in a trembling photo taken of a drawing. The flow of beeswax in the mold and the trembling hand, the slight deviation given to a photograph taken of a drawing, is her germ-chaos.

It is something that the artist directs and at the same time distances herself from the taught, domesticated. The notion of germ-chaos means that there is something the artist places in her work to begin producing lines, which are germinal. What the artist aims for are the minimal differences, the chaos that seethes microscopically under the large visible units, this is for her the “real experience.”

Capturing the essence of art is describing the phases of the process, as the German philosopher Georg Simmel argued. This process elaborated by Carolina is genetic, it is from it that one captures the way in which the genesis emerges in the work in a nascent state and from it one glimpses the maturation of the finished work.

Text by Sara Leal published in the magazine Grotta – Archipelago of Writers, 2021/2022.

Carolina Rocha is a visual artist whose starting point is experimentation, the relationship between action and matter, and the questions that the process provokes in her. It is from this interaction that her ideas and strokes precipitate – in the chemical sense of the word – until they transform into premises.

Carolina welcomes accidents, assuming that the result is a product of chance, thus becoming unrepeatable and unique. She allows an uncontrolled, fortuitous variable to play a role in her creation. It’s her way of privileging the process.

An introductory consideration: understanding that replicas are not copies. Each one results from a gesture (action), a stimulus, at a certain moment. And it is time that determines the integrity of the impression.

There is a poetic beauty in the impossibility of repetition. This singularity is an identity.

It is well known that time is a renowned sculptor. It has already starred in numerous cinematic and literary works and still exists in everyday life.

Where is the end? Carolina asks.

This process resembles the mechanisms of memory.

In the exercise of resorting to our mental sedimentation, we obtain different impressions over time: a fresh memory is vivid and fades away. Images with increasingly tenuous, less vigorous, and precise cadences are referred back to the original. Allowing the stimulus to dry up allows them to fade away. Just like the end that Carolina omits.

I would say, in the end, we will have a paper once again white, unimpressionable. The impression only exists if there is substance, that is, presence.

Does she want to remember the finitude we confront? And with that, the likelihood of disappearing from the memory of those who remain, until there is no trace of our passage on earth? Is it an appeal to revisiting memory, the only catalysis that will enable the maintenance of active substance?

The title “presence” that Carolina gives to the original provides a clue, like an old photograph we fortuitously find in a book. The importance of the trace in memory.

On a broader level, one could enhance reasoning about collective memory in terms of preserving our historical and emotional heritage and enabling it to continue to make impressions.

Text by Assunção Melo published in the Diário Insular, 2012.

Carolina Rocha presents until June 7th of the current year, at the Sala Dacosta of the Museum of Angra do Heroísmo, an exhibition worth visiting, not only for aesthetic reasons and the imperative to get to know our artists, but also for the questions that this exhibition has raised for me (and still raises for the history of art) and that I intend to reflect on in this article. Carolina Rocha was born on Terceira Island in 1987. She holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Escola Superior de Design in Caldas da Rainha. Since 2010, she has participated in various solo and group exhibitions and has received awards in 2012 and 2014.

In this solo show that the artist entitled “Mysteries of Ink,” framing it within the scope of the discipline of painting, a label that (I cannot ignore the initial option) raised several questions for me and that I intend to briefly explore through contemporary art, I interpreted the different situations presented in her pieces as an evolutionary painting, divided into three main sets corroborated by serialized titles: PROCESS, consisting of two pieces, MYSTERIES, a set of 12 works, and CAPELO, two pieces that the artist presents on the floor of that space.

In this sense, it is important, in my view, to take into account these three categories in order to understand the discourse that Carolina Rocha presents in this exhibition. In the first series, Process, the two paintings of the same format are purely two-dimensional. Composed of aqueous ink that highlights the stain, although monochromatic, they are indicative of the process to be used in the remaining series, that is: a markedly compact stain in the upper area of the canvas, which dissipates into streaks of ink, traversing the rest of the pictorial area, drawing watery courses to the bottom. We can easily understand that the artist, by placing the compact and watery stain on a surface, initially horizontal, tilts the plane of the canvas to the vertical, in order to obtain that result. Indeed, this will be the chosen process for the series of twelve paintings that follows, although the texture and nature of the ink are different.

In the Mysteries series, practically monochromatic, but of different colors, neutral tones and ocher tones similar to earth and lava are visible. With this set, Carolina Rocha intends to make an analogy to the paths of lava that composed these islands. On an initially horizontal plane, a very thick layer of ink with a dense texture is placed, which, when tilted from the horizontal to the vertical plane, allows the laws of physics and gravity to “paint” the canvas, without any direct intervention from the artist. This technique creates surprising and casual forms without human, and perhaps divine, intervention.

A similar technique will be used in the floor pieces, titled “Capelo,” which I consider sculptures. Thus, there is an evolution from two-dimensional painting to low-relief painting and then to sculpture. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, this exhibition raised several questions for me, which I myself attributed numbering (1, 4, 5, 8) and others that I understand to be inherent to art history (2, 3, 6, 7):

1 – Artist-spectator/observer: Carolina Rocha does not see herself as the sole creator of the process. The creation process is also a Self Process in accordance with the laws of physics and gravity, limiting her to a spectator/observer condition, more typical of the audience, with the difficult task of defining the limits, stopping, or in other words, the right time to “freeze” the development of the process.

2 – Artist-creator/God Artifex: The artist equates, in using this method, to a Creator, in the broad sense of the term, to a God Artifex, as defined by Omar Calabrese, who has in his hands the function of creating new forms in nature, which was initially God’s function. In this concept, the artist knows that she has this power and uses it with all the laws allowed by human nature.

3 – Performative artist – action painting: In this process, the artist is part of the action to achieve a result. Action painting is a movement in art history that emerged in the late 1940s, allowing the artist to make painting a performative act that required a very concrete action for a final result, leaving that action imprinted on the work itself. Examples of this are Jackson Pollock’s paintings. In the Mysteries series, we know precisely what the action and gestures were that led to that intentional result.

4 – Relief painting: Painting is generally, by definition, a two-dimensional support, to which paint/color is applied and two-dimensional forms and compositions are developed, because traditionally, the paint tends to blend with the support. Not all artists have understood this, and they have added more or less texture to their works, but making the paint itself, form, and composition is already a task that questions the most conservative premises of painting itself. Carolina Rocha’s painting is, in my view, a kind of bas-relief, since the monochromatic ink allows, through these reliefs, the inclusion of areas of shadow and light that form “drawings”.

5 – Painting-sculpture: In the Capelo series, relief painting evolves into sculpture. The artist places it on another plane than the wall. The floor itself is the privileged location of the sculpture, and so it is assumed, although Carolina Rocha certainly continues to call it painting, mainly due to the constitution of the material: ink, a lot of ink.

6 – Automatism: It was a process widely used by the Dadaists of the early 20th century. It allowed chance forces to compose their own pieces. One of the techniques used was to drop small pieces of paper onto the canvases, and the laws of physics and gravity would decide where that piece of paper would be fixed. Analogous experiments were also used in literature and poetry. Carolina Rocha allows herself to automatism to fix a certain moment and state of mind, which is presented in this exhibition.

7 – Self-process: It is more than automatism; it is not allowing human intervention in the development of those forms. As I mentioned in artist – spectator, the process of forming is that of the ink itself. The minimal intervention of the artist is simply to stop the evolution of the forms, so that there is a minimal framework of support and viability of the piece itself.

8 – Truth painting: Without artifices of color, form, and concealed texture, Carolina Rocha’s painting is formulated through the ink itself and contains its own truth. To be simply color and texture, on a previously defined plane and format, commanded by the hands of its creator.