Paula Plee
The Color of Time, an individual exhibition by Carolina
Martinez at Centro Cultural dos Correios in Rio de Janeiro, her
hometown, presents a selection of recent works produced
between 2022 and 2025, along with pieces made over a decade
ago, original Polaroid photographs, and paintings on paper that
date back to the beginning of the artist's career, highlighting
elements and features that define the artist's path through
shapes, light, and colors captured from a mindful gaze on space,
time, and affects. Affect, here, is comprehended in terms of
attention, as an involving and captivating experience that
transforms over time.
In order to highlight unique aspects of the artist's practice, this
text is structured under five distinct axes which, although
addressing distinct aspects of her work, are intertwined,
revealing the connections within her trajectory.
Allowing oneself to be affected here and now
In his graphic novel Here (Quadrinhos na Cia., 2017), Richard
McGuire presents us with the same “corner” made up of the
meeting of three planes: one floor and two walls, on which a
window and a fireplace are set. Over the pages, time flows and
as we witness, in a non-linear way, the unfolding of the daily
scenes of a family—or families— through the decades.
Sometimes we are taken back thousands of years, to the
uninhabited landscape where the house was built, when those
walls did not yet exist, or we move forward hundreds of years,
when they no longer exist.
Small pictures, fragments of other times, overlap the scenes
depicted, revealing how the same place was (and will be) the
stage for countless experiences of human and non-human
beings.
The wallpaper, the furniture, and the carpet that covers the floor
change; the settings are altered, but fragments of celebrations,
disagreements, and ordinary events—such as forgetting the house
keys, reading a book, scenes in which we recognize ourselves and
that permeate the lives of all of us through the years—are
condensed there, in the same space, in the same corner.
One could point out that, as we examine Carolina Martinez's
work, we are often confronted with diverse “corners,” whether
they are formed by three planes—wall, floor, wall—alluding to an
interior space, or made up of the volumes and architectural
elements that recall external spaces, as if we were viewing a
photographic record—or a memory—of the artist's attentive eye,
which seems to aim to capture something that time takes away,
probably something of the silence and the ethereal that is present
in everyday life but goes unnoticed.
They will no longer be here
“They will disappear, they will no longer be here.” This is how
Carolina Martinez refers to the Polaroid photographs she took
from 2010, which later unfolded into paintings, collages, and
paintings on paper. Her photography practice began
unpretentiously. The Polaroid SX-70 camera was a gift from her
husband, and the old, moldy film she employed revealed traces
of chance on the pictures. “It was the imponderable there,” the
artist recounts.
The photographs were then turned into enlargements in which
the artist incorporated wooden slats, or even used them as
support for her paintings on wood and paper. The latter have
accompanied the artist since the very beginning of her career,
due to the fluidity and freedom that this medium provides, as if
the practice could keep up with the thought.
The presence of the imponderable and the ungraspable is
something that the artist's work persistently reminds us of.
After all, the things we build to shelter us—architecture, rooms,
our homes, our “corners”—survive us. Our impermanence is
revealed in the permanence of the spaces we build: the walls,
floors, and roofs that surround our lives and on which
memories, experiences, and accumulations of time, words,
pain, and joy overlap. And the reality, which we often choose to
avoid, is that we are the ones to disappear, perhaps even sooner
than the image fixed in the instant film of a Polaroid fades.
The color of time
Color, one of the main pillars of the artist's work, also marks
the passage of time. At the beginning of her career, both her
paintings and collages followed an austere color palette of
pastel hues: light greens, whites, and pinks in contrast to the
materiality of wood. The previously washed-out, muted tones
were gradually replaced due to another twist of fate: during
the pandemic, faced with a temporary shortage of supplies,
the artist was forced to use the tubes of paint that had
remained filled in her studio—in this case, those containing
the most vibrant and intense colors.
The artist shares that avoiding the use of these shades echoes
the belated recognition of one of her references: Luis
Barragán (1902–1988), a Mexican architect who contributed
enormously to the legacy of architecture but was, in a way,
“left out” of the canon of rational and functionalist modern
architecture due to the incorporation of elements of
traditional Mexican culture—spirituality, colors, light, and
even silence in his projects—aspects that seemed distanced
from the principles strictly followed by modern architects.
By coincidence, these very elements and characters used by
the architect are also intrinsic and central to Carolina's
practice today. Color is not merely a compositional element.
“It is from color that I build spaces to confront reality, and
places that evoke the oneiric, the spiritual. Each chromatic
choice dialogues with another essential layer in my research,
which is materiality,” the artist informs.
Walls, mater, space
With a background in architecture, Carolina Martinez led a
double life as an “architect-artist” for a moment, but colors and
brushes ultimately won the match. Architecture, however,
became a guide of and makes itself present in her compositions,
whether through pictorial representation, the media, or the
proportions and scales of the works.
For some time, the artist opted for square supports for her
paintings, since—in addition to the format of the Polaroids that
founded her artistic practice—the shape resembles the
proportions found in construction materials such as tiles,
ceramic floors, and panels. It was only later that she moved on
to painting on large-scale rectangular supports. In this sense, the
wood used as support for her paintings embodies a central
aspect of her practice: the union of materiality and color.
In the Perímetros series, initiated in 2015 and represented here
by an untitled work from 2025, the artist incorporates wooden
slats that follow the boundaries of the color fields but exceed the
plane of the support. Blurring the boundaries between object
and painting, the works in the series penetrate the surface of the
wall through the projection of shadows.
“The supports bring what I cannot control,” points out
Martinez, who has been experimenting with different materials,
always featuring an architectural element, as in the case of the
paintings on cement boards and ceramic tiles, handmade by the
artist and painted with matte engobe. This procedure allows
Carolina to test color movements closer to painting, and the
final result is only known after it is burned.
Other recent experiments include ceramic pieces, hand-molded
by the artist, later colored with acrylic paint and then
incorporated into her paintings on wood, as one can see in
Contemplation and Untitled, both from 2025. In Dobras da cor
(Folds of Color, 2025)—a tribute to the folds present in the precast
reinforced concrete panels used in projects by the architect
Lina Bo Bardi, such as the Coati restaurant and Casa do Benin,
both in Salvador, co-designed with João Filgueiras Lima, known
as Lelé—Carolina paints directly onto the ceramics. Each side
of the folds is painted with a different color, creating a visual
effect that changes as the observer moves in front of the work,
introducing a kineticism unprecedented in her production.
The nature within the painting
At the same time that the artist starts exploring more vibrant
tones in her work, a circular element emerges in her paintings,
as noted in the 2022 piece Untitled, composed of four 20x20 cm
square frames in which planes, corners, and openings divide the
composition with a circular shape coming from above,
representing the sun.
The presence of the star marks, in Carolina's words, a
movement of “bringing nature into” the works. However,
nature was already present, mainly through the use of color as a
resource to create the luminance that inhabits the works. In
Clareira (2025) and Despertar em todo lugar (2025), both
paintings in engobe on ceramic tile, the artist allies color and
light in a gradient that reminds us of landscapes enlightened by
the sun at dawn.
Another hint of nature in the works is the artist's use of the
golden spiral—a spiral-shaped curve that grows proportionally
according to the ratio that appears when a sequence of arcs is
constructed within rectangles whose sides have the same
proportion. This spiral is seen in nature in shells, galaxies,
cyclones, flowers, and even in the proportions of the human
body.
In Toda vida (2022), a hand-painted multiple with three
color variations, Carolina Martinez uses the rectangle
containing the golden spiral as a basis for creating a threedimensional
painting, composed of wooden pieces painted
in different shades. In the exhibition, the viewer is invited to
manipulate the work, partaking in a game of combinations
between shapes and colors that brings them even closer to
the artist's practice.
According to Martinez, this work alludes to the control we
assume we have over life, but which nevertheless always
holds “the unpredictable that we never see coming.” The
artist, like all of us, faces a daily choice: to shrink in the face
of the unpredictable and hardships in dark times, or to
move forward, persistently turning her eyes to the beautiful
(both tangible and intangible) and to the light present in
everything that surrounds us each day. Martinez,
fortunately, chooses to share with us her way of being in the
world and, day after day, chooses to leave her mark on time
with color.
Translated by Pauli Carvalho