Emanuel de Carvalho throws his viewers off-kilter. In large and intimately scaled paintings, the artist questions the limits of perception, combining familiar elements such as café tables, human figures, and lecture halls with unnatural viewpoints and warped perspectives. He mixes his colors to match our idea of reality, but there is a dystopian feel to his gray-toned spaces that evoke institutional control.
“I’m interested in how we perceive the world around us,” de Carvalho, who is trained in neuro-ophthalmology, said in an interview with Artsy just before the opening of “code new tate,” his exhibition at Gathering in London, on view through June 1st. “There are structures that dictate how we think, interpret an image, or perceive our environment. These are so entrenched that we sometimes forget to dig into our constructs,” he said.
He began thinking about how his own views are shaped while working with neurological patients who experienced a vastly different way of perceiving than others. This led him to explore how his own understanding of the world might be influenced by his position within it. His work is also informed by the alienation he experienced growing up in Portugal as he explored his sexual identity.
De Carvalho graduated with a painting masters from the Royal College of Art in 2023. His works initially focused more directly on himself. Then he began to investigate Foucault’s ideas about how power structures, from the government to educational systems and medical institutions, dictate our understanding of the world. Now, his deeply conceptual pieces are derived from research and collaboration, with a less personal approach: He collaborated with French philosopher Catherine Malabou and neurologist Parashkev Nachev on a sculpture for “Code New State.”
“For me, philosophy is a way of being in the world,” he said. “I’m not religious or spiritual. It’s a way for me to understand what’s happening in society and get to the root of ‘why.’” As such, his works uphold a delicate balance between realism and chaos. While many artists explore perception through exuberant means—like the tumultuous depictions of the unconscious unleashed in Surrealism, or the drug-induced visions of psychedelic imagery—de Carvalho pictures something close to reality, then subtly distorts it.
For example, his large canvas code lack (2024), on the first floor of the exhibition, depicts a man sitting at an outside dining table and chairs. These parts are rendered realistically; however, other elements are unsettling, with a strange, high-up viewpoint and odd proportions. While he looks as though he is seated at a café waiting for service or a friend, nothing else in the paintings suggests this setting.
“I want to elicit a sense of recognition in the viewer,” he said. “We are built to recognize objects, faces, and spaces. If something seems off, it triggers a mechanism called ‘anticipatory imagery,’ this notion that the brain fires a signal saying, ‘This is off, should I start an anxious response?’ I’m interested in that moment.”
Two large sculptures (lack skill 1 and lack slit system, both 2024) play with bodily perception and evoke a physical awkwardness. The first, a long, hollow trapezoid, is placed upon legs that render it too high to be a table, but too low for viewers to look through without bending over. The other functions as a giant surveillance tower, inviting viewers to crawl inside with the promise of looking out the top; once inside, viewers are simply trapped within its cell-like form. Likewise, de Carvalho uses light in an unsettling manner. The gallery spaces eschew bright spotlights for something soft and shadowy, rendering the upstairs paintings subject to change as the day outside progresses. This unnerving use of light matches the illuminations in his paintings, which seem to come from unknown sources off canvas.
De Carvalho calls this tactic “making oppressive paintings.” “There are a lot of exit points and entry points; a lot of cracks and fragments; unusual orientations,” he said. De Carvalho celebrates these cracks in our visual understanding of the world, rather than full-blown explosions, which gradually allow some light in from a new direction.
