YHP is pleased to present the five-year project by Brazilian artist Caio Carpinelli, in dialogue with seminal American artist Bruce Nauman. The work emerges as a liminal gesture between the density of matter and the dissolution of pictorial thought, occupying a point of inflection where painting reveals itself not as surface, but as a field of spatial forces.

The analogy with Bruce Nauman arises not from mere formal affinity or reverent citation, but from a structural resonance: both artists devise mechanisms in which the body — of the artist and the viewer — becomes an activating element within a field of perceptual instability. If Nauman, in Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio, transforms minimal repetition into a space for corporeal and sonic reflection, Carpinelli transposes that same logic onto the pictorial surface, where each black layer operates as a vector of interference and reorientation of visual experience.

In Chamber of Reflection (2025), Carpinelli articulates painting as event — not in a narrative sense, but as a formal occurrence generated by the friction between gesture and the resistance of materials. The use of canvases on the floor, the introduction of pigments developed through chemical experimentation intrinsic to the painting process, and the spatial arrangement of the works imply a choreography where emphasis lies less on the final outcome and more on the procedural condition of making. There is a performative intelligence at play, in which both the artist’s and the viewer’s bodies function as instruments of translation between the immaterial (idea) and the material (painting). Just as Nauman fixed the camera and submitted his body to repetition and error, Carpinelli stabilizes the canvas to destabilize perception, projecting the viewer into a specular field of optical reverberations.
Carpinelli’s black — never opaque, never complete — is a mutating entity: a surface that transmutes into volume, reflection, absence, and intensity. He departs from any immediate symbolism of the color, such as representations of emptiness or death, to operate in an almost liturgical register of matter. Like an alchemist of the minimal, the artist converts black into a field of immanence: a blind mirror where light is captured, filtered, and returned under new coordinates.

Painting, then, is no longer a window onto the world, but a mirror for thought. Through circular gestures, incisions, and overlapping layers, the artist constructs a topography that demands from the eye not only contemplation, but displacement — a form of seeing that is also a way of reading and feeling. If Carpinelli’s inaugural gesture is, as Nauman reminds us, to communicate an experience rather than information, then Chamber of Reflection is a rite of passage: a traversal through the thickness of the image. His work imposes upon the viewer an alternate temporality — a mental time, in which painting becomes a meditative, almost monastic, field.

Here, conceptual tradition is not expressed through language or text, but through a tactile sophistication of thought. The encounter with Nauman is fulfilled not as historical reverence, but as methodological reinvention: both artists offer the viewer a rarefied space, where body and mind are reconfigured in the face of unknowing, of the unfamiliar. And it is at this threshold — where black becomes clarity and painting becomes experience — that Carpinelli powerfully inaugurates his artistic journey.

There is a light to it.
It was born from drawing,
but it is more than its mother.

There is more to it — in a painting.
What you see already goes beyond what is seen; it reflects.
It came suddenly, as if it had always been there.
It’s pointless to try to trace where it begins.
It’s about the process.

What you see transcends what it is, because of how it became.
The process goes beyond the line, the cotton canvas,
the gesso, the aluminum bar stretched evenly.

It carries the light, the moisture, the dryness,
the number of strokes, the precise milliliters in each composition.
It holds the tired arm of long hours,
the excitement in every new cover,
the exact moment the line meets the surface.

What you see goes beyond the process itself.
It invited full hours, full days — only to be lived.
The anxiety, the fears, the dreamy mornings
and, most of all, the nights filled with excitement for what could come.

All of it was part of it.
It goes beyond me, beyond those days.
It was born simply to be —
a fruit of nothing but work and decisions.

To be more than what I was.
It is more than me —
without ever being, and never going.

Everything here is new.
The drawings are evolution-pictures.

The canvas, smooth like paper, reveals and conceals
many layered surfaces.

Everything was calculated.
Everything was measured.
Its size became something I could no longer handle alone —
it began to drift away from me.

The water, the gesso, the dryness.
Only raw white,
only to become deep reflective black.

The first layers were pure shock,
beginning already with opposition.
The oil would meet the water,
again and again —
only with time and repetition —
to become something else.
Yet still, a reflection of all that came before.

The previous marks were taken away,
leaving behind new layers of what once was.
The blackness overtook it all.
It changed at every moment,
following the rhythm of the day.

It began to get messy — like a birth.
A gigantic body,
leaving parts of itself in our homes, our clothes.

And then, suddenly,
others began to see it.
To become familiar with it.
To add meaning.

To show that what you created
could become more than what you intended it to be.

There was a monumentality in the way people gathered around it —
a village took care.

It is something born from process.
There was no space large enough to mount it fully.
Only a distant idea could carry us together along this path.

Painting is a secret language,
and we agree — in covenant —
to keep the fire lit.

Caio Carpinelli
April 2025