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 “The Oscillating” held at the Ante-Sala and Salão da BASE, 2023.