Carolina Vieira’s Pedra Sol was inaugurated at Porta33 in Funchal on a lunar eclipse night. This astronomical phenomenon, occurring when the moon is completely or partially hidden by the earth’s shadow, could well be one of the interior landscapes that Carolina Vieira offers us.

The atmospheric set of paintings on show at Porta 33 shows her keen and sensitive eye for Madeira’s landscape and natural phenomena, the archipelago where she was born and raised. This exhibition is the outcome of a residency on the island of Porto Santo that took place between 2022 and 2023 as part of the EIRA – Contributos para a Escola do Porto Santo e o seu território programme, curated by Nuno Faria.

Speaking to the Público newspaper about her 2010 anthological exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Madeiran artist Lourdes Castro commented on her work that her “painting is this: living, being here“. I think that Carolina Vieira’s work is based on this very state of presence that Lourdes Castro mentions. This presence translates into a way of operating “based on a particularly acute focus on the sensitive world“, quoting Nuno Faria, from the text included in the exhibition.

Carolina Vieira sees nature not as a system made up of different parts, but as an ever-changing organism that is never finished with its observation and seeks to crystallise this sensorial and intimate observation through painting. In his book On the Modification of Clouds, Johann Wolfgang Goethe notes and describes clouds and atmospheric phenomena in general. He recognises that “nature opens up to certain spirits” and “communes intimately and uninterruptedly with some souls”. Carolina Vieira is certainly one of those Goethe refers to.

Above all, Pedra Sol is an experience. An immersive, personal and intimate experience, in which the visible leads to the invisible. This infinity is directed towards an unrecognisable limit. Echoing the nature representations of Romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich or William Turner, Carolina Vieira’s paintings convey something beyond the place being represented to convey the feeling it evokes. “I don’t try to depict the landscape for the landscape’s sake, but for the sake of some inner state,” she says.

Repeated layers of watered-down acrylic paint more or less reveal the previous layer, letting a greater or weaker degree of light emerge onto the canvas surface. This results in a depth into which we can dive. A depth that becomes even more evident due to the deliberate removal of matter from the support. The absence of any paintbrush marks or the elimination of the violent gesture of painting gives the paintings back their silent state, a fundamental condition in the artist’s work.

Reaching this condition requires a painstaking and time-consuming trial and error process resulting in several “failed paintings”. Out of these, through a folding process, small three-dimensional objects come into being, sometimes joined with stones or other elements collected by the artist during her Porto Santo walkabouts. Enigmatic object-paintings, “mistakes”, as she called them, or even “accidents”, that take on meaning before the painter’s eyes and gestures, in this case those of a female painter.

Carolina Vieira, writing about the exhibition, refers to Porto Santo “as a place that emphasises optical phenomena and sensations since, throughout its entire extension, it emanates an intense clarity, at times close to a fragmented blindness. (…) There, the stones shed light.” One could argue that the set of paintings she presents is a reflection not only on the place – which could be anywhere other than Porto Santo -, but also on ourselves, on our most hidden side, our position in the world. These intimate, heartfelt landscapes emerge from a profound interior where stone turns into sunshine, the colourless becomes translucent or even transparent, and where darkness shines forth, transcending us through blindness.

For sculptor David d’Angers, C. Friedrich managed to express a feeling of tragedy through landscape. Carolina Vieira’s landscapes offer us beauty, an enveloping and appeasing light, which at the same time dazzles, intrigues and challenges us to look again. A feeling bordering on the sublime. Quoting Nuno Faria’s words, during the open conversation that took place to mark the exhibition’s inauguration, “Carolina Vieira’s work is that of someone who is older than her physical age“.

On leaving the gallery, the earth’s shadow was still visible at one edge of the moon. A halo divided into rainbow colours encircled the celestial body, announcing the upcoming rainy day.

The exhibition Pedra Sol by Carolina Vieira can be enjoyed until February 3, 2024 at Porta33 in Funchal.