Women stare out from their paintings, eyes perpetually sparkling with glassy tears. These women were painted centuries ago. Maybe they were mere figments of imagination, even then. Still, they are beautiful, adorned in sumptuous fabrics and glittering jewels, though they bear no volition. They are witnesses to time, no matter their will.
In haunting new paintings, Canadian artist Jennifer Carvalho recasts women she’s culled from Old Master works by Giotto to Rogier van der Weyden. The paintings, which are now on view in “Ghost” at Franz Kaka Gallery in Toronto, show these women as shadows of themselves, frozen in the past while witnessing the present (through October 12).
Jennifer Carvalho in her studio. Photograph by Colin Outridge. Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto.
“I think about these women like a Greek chorus who are witnessing or commenting [on] what’s unfolding,” said Carvalho, of her paintings. Carvalho, who studied art history as an undergraduate, has long been mesmerized by the beauty and majesty of Renaissance paintings. Finding her way to painting in the years after college, she began to wonder how these sentient paintings had actively shaped her understanding of the world.
“What ideas or expired ideologies are passed on through these art historical objects? What have we kept?” she wondered. Finding resonance in Mark Fisher’s book Ghosts Of My Life, which speaks about the ways we can be haunted by futures that never came to be, Carvalho began to see centuries-old paintings as more potent and uncanny than she had ever expected.
Jennifer Carvalho, An archive of gestures (House of Orchard) (2024). Photograph: LFdocumentation. Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto.
“There are ghosts of the past that follow us into the present moment and are haunting this present moment in a way we can never fully articulate,” she explained. “They’re mingling with us.”
She considers her paintings on one level a kind of archeology of art history, a dusting off and unveiling of the past in the present. Her paintings isolate elements— a jewel, a hand, a tear-stained cheek, a cathedral arch—to draw attention to these living ruins. In Ghost, one painting, Crying woman (van der Weyden) focuses on the face of just one weeping woman. The framing feels oddly contemporary, like a face on a newspaper.
Over the past few years, Carvalho, who was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1980, has caught the eye of pace-setting galleries in the U.S. and Canada with these quiet, haunting works. The recently closed and highly regarded New York downtown gallery Helena Anrather had held two solo exhibitions of her work. The most recent “Looking Perfectly Still” in November and December of 2023, included unexpectedly cropped and compressed vignettes from the Renaissance and antiquity. Franz Kaka, whose first exhibition of her work was “Every Empire Has An End” in 2019, presented a solo booth of her works at NADA in New York in May of this year.
Jennifer Carvalho in her studio. Photograph by Colin Outridge. Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto.
These are more than homages to the past, however. The artist sees her works as deeply rooted in social and economic histories, not just art history. The dawn of the conception of the artist as the author during the Renaissance resulted in increasingly individualized pictorial worlds when human expression was prized. “I was looking at Rogier wan der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. In that painting, there’s an interesting shift where he is painting these crying women with a lot more emotion than had been articulated before,” she said. “This overt emotionality was innovative and happened when there was a shift from the guild system of the collective to an individualism. Whose bodies were allowed to display that emotionality? Typically, it was saintly figures, out of this world.”
She also sees the sumptuousness of the garments in Renaissance paintings as a particularly human pleasure. “The textile industry was rising in Renaissance Italy. These fabrics would be some of the most expensive items that an individual or a church would own. In the works of Piero della Francesco, his saintly figures were wearing the latest, most fashionable brocades being produced at that time,” she noted. “These saints were wearing contemporary luxury items. People were maybe hoping in the afterlife they’d have these really amazing clothes. It’s not so different from our desires today.”
Despite her focus on Renaissance imagery, Carvalho counts filmmakers Agnes Varda, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Chris Marker among her strongest influences. Though at first an unexpected reference, one soon notices the filmic sensibility of her works. Carvalho’s choices to isolate and overlay details—and at times to offer panoramic views—are like cinematic cropping, her slow reveals, like long views and close-ups, building tensions and momentum over time. In fact, earlier works by Carvalho pulled from film still.
Jennifer Carvalho, An archive of gestures (clothes horse) (2024). Photograph: LFdocumentation. Courtesy of the artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto.
This cinematic sensibility endures, still, in the graininess that she imbues into these works, too. Carvalho paints very close to her canvases, slowly, building up thin veils of paint over time. The slowness of her process gives the works a crystalized, distant quality, as though we were viewing these women through a rain-touched window or like a photograph pushed to the point of pixelation.
Drawing out the moment of looking is essential to experiencing her paintings, and allowing the moment meet you. “Through my building up of materials on the surface, I want to experience a slowing sense of time,” she said. These images are meant to appear not as new paintings but rather as relics that have endured, or perhaps even come forth to meet us.
“There’s a malleability to these images. These crying women have the potential to come to the present moment, in maybe empathy and connection to people from the past,” she said “I wonder what they think of the world we’ve inherited. Maybe there’s a reminder of our responsibility to the future.”