Night falls, but twilight plays host to a strange phosphorescence. Carolina Antich's most recent series of works immediately draws attention to a renewed sensitivity to painting's materiality: relief, contrast, vibration. The rarefaction of her earlier work scenes bare to the point of transparency or shyly intimated is subtly challenged. Painting's reason commands, privileging buildups and overlays: traces of a formal inquiry that can accept and transform mistakes into disquieting form. These presences dot the new paintings; irruptions that are more or less phantasmagoric, by they of the artist or her figures. They can be objects from other worlds, traces of a catastrophic event, small animals captured at night, or figures emanating a fated light. The figures are always children absorbed in their discoveries, their expressions deeply concentrated. They live with a strange distance, they watch us from their refuge, they leave us a premonition of their secrets. Seeking complicity in their cold, reserved glance is of no use. A child hidden behind a tree gazes out with wide open eyes: he doesn't seem to be afraid but remains attentive to every signal. An absolutely dazzling, fair, still nameless young girl is caressed by the foliage of a nocturnal wood. In a vaguely oneiric landscape, a group of children swim in a stretch of water inundated with light. Here too the contrast is clear: the form of a tree in a completely dark foreground resumes the themes of the wood and the gaze seeking sheltereven if it is now the viewer peering out from the shadows. With this play of concealment and deliberate distance, Antich no longer evokes a fairytale world but the coldness of introversion, certainly not that of indifference, but that which is the condition of utmost exposure.
Francisco Rocca
