This return to figuration allows Carlos Perez to give substance to his most evanescent, most elusive memories. These memories are made of silence, infinite solitude, and a melancholy that haunts the childhood of a “tender heart, boring the wide black void.”
In his large pastels, Carlos traces powdery flat tones in a bright yet unsettling color palette. From beneath their velvety surface, a few objects, a bird, or a spectral child emerge, rendered in colors as piercing as a newborn’s cry.
The spaces are simultaneously too vast and too confined. Barely outlined, they seem too large for the child or the objects attempting to curl up in them. Yet the suspended structures, shaky chairs, half-drawn windows, walls with dissolving contours, trap us in a threshold forgotten by the world. As for the blue of the great outdoors, it is glimpsed, yet remains out of reach.
This space, which struggles to know what to do with itself—expanding, compressing, and twisting—seems to vibrate with sensations, scents, and sounds. It is a universe that espouses the hypnotic and unsettling atmosphere of Baudelaire’s poem Harmonie du Soir (Evening Harmony), from which the artist draws his titles.
Perhaps the most haunting canvas is that of a child with a fixed, transfigured gaze, clutching a bird while the fierce warmth of flat yellow and orange fields radiates around him: “The sun drowns itself in clotting blood...” Others are more peaceful and melancholic: “The sky is sad and beautiful like a great altar,” a bird is silhouetted against the sky, a child staring at it through the window.
From the canvas to the poem, Carlos reconstructs fleeting sensations and the persistent anxiety of a child’s heart, tightening in the solitude of a hospital yard.

Judith Adler de Oliveira