{1} Here is my attempt to keep hold of the turmoil that took root inside me and to record what it meant, in my tender twenties, to abandon the cerebral structures of Brazilian Concretism championed by my teacher, in favour of the putrefaction of Francis Bacon. Bacon’s work always unsettled me, for I mistrust the loveliest faces, as though beneath them lay decay, the death I would later glimpse in Ingres’s Odalisque or Titian’s Venus.

{2} The clammy drag of dry pastel used in most of these works suits the lethargy of this greasy realm with its worn‑out edges, where creatures melt into one another, unable to bear the weight of their own identity and seeking fresh monstrosities through a hybridisation that is at once pure hope and the panic of solitude. It is hard not to linger over the chromatic exuberance pressed into the artist’s swollen hands, which surely traced her perspiring fingers across paper and impasto beneath the studio heat. The volatile pastel rewards such spontaneity, translating decadent expressiveness through vigorous gestures that nevertheless move slowly, much like the figures easing into one another, as though the artistic process had absorbed the condition of the things it depicts, accentuating the kinship between the two worlds. This lazy agility resembles the tremor of a tragic passion, too tired to rebel against its own despair.

{3} I think of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land. Son of man, you cannot say or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images. How can one re‑stitch reality from this cacophonous constellation? Torn from any broader context, the beings here are merely severed limbs, stray fragments of hidden wholes, trapped in collapsing situations. Yet if being is understood only in the light of its circumstances, how are we to recognise them? Such vertigo deprives painting of its representative burden and its customary narrative gifts. With no story to tell and no model to identify, the figures become icons of a nearly gentle monumentality, vulnerable in their delicacy, through which we can enlarge our perception by trying out fresh perspectives on their nature. Abstracted beings quiver with desire, and I might pity their loneliness, seeing us all in them. There is grandeur in their smallness, humanity in their strangeness, energy in their confinement, but never a symphony in their dissonance. Their drama lies in the quest for wholeness within a reality committed to fracture. These are admirable artistic devices, yet can the painter innovate at the expense of her figures? Does morality enter the simulacrum? In their blind eyes I see first indifference, then despair, then exhaustion. Much is made of the claim that Shakespeare never judged his characters, but perhaps Eliot disliked Hamlet because the Bard granted the prince too much licence.

{4} More than a mere nod to youthful perversity, the artistic nude in classical Greece served to fuse the cosmic and the erotic: the statue’s perfect proportions revealed a mathematical harmony that enticed us to overcome isolation and belong to the whole. What, then, was the sacred purpose of the peplos, the rectangular tunic that covered the flawless body? Greek intelligence, in love with clarity, with eros and with reason, did not favour the force of the implicit. In Christian painting the smooth robes of saints hide the body not only to privilege the spirit but also to offer a reality whose essence is mysterious, seducing through absence. To gauge the scale of our present frustration, Carvalho merges both traditions: she removes the peplos only to find on the naked body not a stellar mirror but a disappointing handful of limbs that reinforce our smallness before the paradox of existence. Instead of contemplated beauty, this nakedness embodies the shame of sensing one’s own ugliness condemned by worldly eyes. We do not feel like marble; we feel like the homunculus, an anatomical distortion that enlarges our sensitive zones as if physical pleasure outranked cosmic discernment. Like her figures, we are the open bloom of futile sensation, whose tragedy may be the search for redemption through touch.

{5} This viscous universe links the fat of organs, the vulgarity of fruit, the boorishness of flowers and the vigour of celestial bodies. Every fruit is the womb of a tree offering its foetus to the hungry, and flowers are the genitalia of plants eager to display their libido to the world. Such brazenness almost tempts me to bar minors from florists, hothouses and gardens. Anyone who sees only cheerful tropicalism in Carmen Miranda’s hat is mistaken; she crowns herself with the world’s cornucopia to remind us of the inevitable triumph of natural impulses over our brittle intellect. Freed from the methodical cage of reason, these painted bodies drift into disordered extravagance, as repellent as a cosmos that perseveres not by subtle strategy but by excess fertility, as if the universe were underpinned by a mute libido attentive solely to its own genital needs. Stupidity runs through her work in three ways: ignorance of cosmic dynamics, blindness to our bodily mechanics and the superficiality of her profound paintings.

{6} Tired of despair or overtaken by senility, the works in the final rooms forsake the tragic for a grotesque innocence. In permissive, playful panoramas they braid severed limbs and bodily fluids to amuse themselves with our finitude. This scatological irreverence reminded me of the pop nature of certain children’s advertisements and of the textures in novelty clothing. Delicate strokes and bright tones sharpen the cynicism, marrying childish purity to the revulsion of corpses. Is this show the holiday experience of a child who, sitting on scorching sand with melting ice‑cream on her fingers, suddenly realises the repulsiveness of a futile cosmos? Mondrian’s endless grids overflow their frames to promote a rationality that exceeds natural limits; these works prolong clashing patterns to signal the absurdity of seeking meaning in a universe where everything mingles in a sublime orgy of profane bodies. This eroticism cannot seduce; it is purely mechanical, its gestures the involuntary habits of lifeless forms. Transcendence is not solely the province of Mondrian. Erotic pleasure is an evolutionary luxury that flings us beyond biology: anyone who observes animal sex sees the pragmatic essence of a cosmos that reproduces itself without investing in pleasure.

{7} Like a digestive tract doubling back on itself to bathe in its own bile for easier contact, everything here converges on the skin only to be smothered at the surface. El Greco, a precocious modern for recognising the concreteness even of divine things, sensed a panic at the unbearable density that materialism creates. His Jesus spreads his arms not to approach God but to push away the weight of the heavens and finally breathe. Carvalho’s figures are trapped in a similar bind, though they lack the elegance of Christ. Each painting holds all the world’s suffocation, stages that intensify experience yet prevent it from expanding. Opposed to entropy, this reality wishes to contract back into maximum density. Malleable bodies occupy impenetrable spaces; the agony of the figures ranges from submission to terror.

{8} Perhaps even more dazzling than Greek harmony was the optical world of the theologians who, captivated by the homogeneous spectrum of divine light, understood reality as the play of reflections from the countless faces of a crystalline creation. Some works here likewise feature colours that do not sprout from matter but bounce in from external light, though the effect confuses rather than enchants. An orgy of tones, no longer rooted in origin, is lost in ethereal debauchery whose lightness contrasts with pastel’s viscosity while heightening the claustrophobia of the scenes. Eternal pawns in a game too vast for their grasp, the figures belong yet do not know to what. In other pieces the raw chromatic clash between figure and shrieking background may stress the uneasy hysteria of belonging to circumstances from which one cannot break free. Between the suffocation of coagulated air and the dizziness of a glittering labyrinth, where are we to place our restlessness?

{9} An anaesthesia brought on by overstimulation is the reward for those who bravely face the cosmic orgy, stunned by the galactic battering. Such sublime terror turns even the gentlest touch into the rough delight of a splinter in the anus. Yet there is transcendence in exhaustion, as though absolute fatigue marked the final boundary that only spirit can cross. Perhaps that is why these works retain a sense of sanctity accessible only to those who see through pain. If the figures contain neither the grace of souls nor the sophistication of false prophets, then might they be the husks left behind by spirits that have transcended? As when a believer glimpses the divine through a pallid corpse, their libidinous pessimism fosters a spiritual optimism. This reality, intoxicated with contact yet starved of affection, may be the portrait of redemption.

Peplum, by Francisca Carvalho, is on show at Fundação Carmona e Costa until May 3.