It Started with a Spark speaks of a moment unseen, like that which set off the cosmos. The atmosphere of the gallery becomes an otherworldly one, as Berlin-based artist Maximilian Rödel’s expansive and impalpable paintings – like colossal fragments of the stratosphere – are brought earthbound and held here, setting both tone and scene for a site-specific mylar installation by New York artist Grace Villamil. Of a sensitive and singular vision, Villamil’s radiant terrain attenuates rational thought – obscuring the known and unknown – while inviting viewers to places far and transient. It Started with a Spark, Carvalho Park’s second exhibition, opens the evening of April 12, 6PM to 9PM, and is on view from April 13 to May 23.

In a neo-Romantic air, with sustained feeling of tone and oneness, Rödel’s paintings seem to rematerialize the immaterial. With illusory effect and irrepressible luminosity, the work suggests it is of atmosphere itself. Hovering despite its expanse and visual weight, a third dimension also enters the viewer’s perception when facing the work, like a glimpse of sky through continual clouds. It is Rödel’s handling of color that unbinds and opens the picture plane. Ambiguous transitions of tonalities - hazy veils of violet that develop to a plum gray or clouds of pale yellow that lead to faint green – are without beginning or end and completely transcend the physicality of the work. These chromatic fields are unsuppressed and subsuming, color put forth with inescapable authority.

In Villamil’s sculpted scenery there is a feeling of remoteness, of cosmos far off, yet there is also a visual correlative to the secret, inner recesses one explores in one’s mind. With absorbing synthesis, Villamil’s work connects worlds – not only of the external and internal, but of the abstracted and the recognizable, of the unknown and the intimate. Here, too, is a duality of lightness and gravity, as the mylar in its perceptible fragility shifts shape – human-like in its malleability – taking on a geological physicality as it contours, cocoons and pillars, occupying and expanding the gallery space as a dynamic landscape. In each fold of the mylar is the reflected sense of the infinite. Villamil’s treatment of infinity is both visual and physical, and both universal and singular. The work as effectively engages our need for sensory involvement as the desire to retreat into oneself.

This exhibition marks the first time that Maximilian Rödel’s works are exhibited in the United States.

Commissioned by Prelude Projects, a new dance work will be set within the installation to an original score by featured artist Grace Villamil. Choreographed by Michelle Thompson Ulerich, and performed by Isabelle Seiler + Marissa Frey, it will be performed on three occasions: 05.10.19 | 05.16.19 | 05.23.19

All performances start promptly at 7:30PM + run for 15 minutes. The final performance will close the exhibition.