For the Transe section, Caio Carpinelli presents an installation and a set of four paintings that renew his interest in the metaphysical dimension of color. Inspired by both physical experimentation and the artistic investigations of artists such as Michael Heizer and Gerhard Richter, the artist establishes a controlled environment in his space, dubiously evoking and rejecting the laboratory and the gallery – both institutions deprived of discursive sacredness. Using only three elements (raw cotton, prepared plaster, and a generous layer of black oil paint), Carpinelli has centralized his discussion on the vibrancy of color, the allure of apprehension of forms, and the agency of the body that surrounds the large-format installation.

In the painting series “Lethe” (2025), the cut precedes the painting: by sectioning the canvas into five sides, sometimes obtained from the 3÷3 rule, sometimes from the golden ratio, the artist constructs a perspective form that converges toward the center. Oil paint then enters the scene, covering the areas with repetitive brushstrokes, obsessively trying to hide its own trace. If the dark membrane obscures the lines from the most inattentive observer, its edges deceive the senses and recall steel plates – something like looking inside out at Tony Smith’s cubes. The title “Lethe,” the ancient Greek word for “forgetfulness” and the complementary opposite of “Aleteia,” “truth,” leads to a discussion about the ambivalent nature of painting: while staging a fiction about what lies beyond its surface, it is also embodied materiality. By exposing the master tool that sustains the figurative farce, Carpinelli dissects its function in the essay of abstraction.

The dissection continues in the installation “Double Slit” (2025), where three columns stand before a large canvas—this one, once again sectioned, but now from a circular shape in the center, which separates the black paint covering at the edges of the composition, reserving the raw fabric for the core. The same principle operates in the columns: their internal, parallel faces are coated in dark matter, similar to Carpinelli’s pictorial logic, with one exception: here, they bear the grooves and obstructions of a thick layer.

The installation rehearses the conditions of the double-slit physics experiment, first performed by Thomas Young in 1801, where the dual nature of electrons (later extended to atoms and molecules) is first perceived. One of the fundamental tests of quantum mechanics, it describes how particles, which can behave as both waves and beams, alter their propagation in random ways—and how the simple act of observing their behavior influences this choice. Such amazement suggests that observation is not a passive act, but that it plays a role in creating the reality we experience.

This statement seems to double the status of the work of art in the contemporary context, where works by artists from the global South are read in the wake of the social and geographic structures surrounding their creators. In a broader sense, it presents poetic creation as a pendulum that fluctuates between figuration and abstraction—or, as the artist once pointed out to me, as an “abstract tangle that sometimes confirms itself in the tiny bundle of form we call figuration.” In the spin of this roulette wheel, color for Carpinelli is both an index of the brushstroke and an image of death and life – the presence of color that summons the self of presence, and its subsequent absence in the void of form.

Lucas Albuquerque