Amadeo Carvalho: In the Body, The Word – Voices That Become Image
A Collection That Speaks Through Silence
With In The Body, The Word – Voices That Become Image, Amadeo Carvalho presents a collection that refuses to remain silent. These are not merely portraits — they are echoes. Each face, each layer, each mark becomes a trace left behind, a refusal to be forgotten.
Born from the ongoing series THE BLACKNESS IN ME STAINS (THE BIMS) II, this collection is both tender and defiant — a whisper that becomes a wound, a wound that becomes a voice. Carvalho honours Black women, their resistance, and the way memory is carried in the body.
The Word That Refuses to Fade
At the heart of this collection lies the tension between visibility and silence. In some works, words erupt from the surface; in others, they hide in shadows — but they are never erased. This is a visual archive of what persists, even when forgotten by history.
Inspired by a poem by Érica Silva, language becomes medium, not just inscription. The word is carved, stained, scorched into the canvas. It inhabits the works just as fully as the figures themselves, offering a space of reclamation and survival.
A Shared Body of Memory and Resistance
In The Body, The Word is a collective body, bearing the weight of inherited silence and the strength of survival. These works honour ancestral voices and advocate tenderness toward future generations.
Carvalho does not merely paint; he writes with flesh and pigment. Each canvas is a site of resistance — an act of memory and a defiant assertion of existence.
This is art that stains because it lives. And it lives because it refuses to be silenced.
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