You were reading a somewhat retro love letter, the last in history. But you have not received it yet. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably.

––– J.D.

Jacques Derrida’s 1980 book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, is a strange piece of writing: a satire of the epistolary novel which combines fragments of intimate letters to an unnamed love with dense critical essays about some core assumptions of psychoanalytic theory. With characteristic deconstructionist zeal, Derrida confronts the weighty tradition of western philosophy – from Plato to Lacan – with the most ephemeral and light-hearted of literary forms: the humble carte postale.

Across the book, postcards and letters become rich philosophical objects. In one passage, Derrida wonders how to decide which side of a postcard comes first. Where does meaning begin? The image or the text? In another, a lost letter in a short story by Edgar Allen Poe is used as an illustration of Derrida’s post-structuralist view of how meaning is generated. Like any communication, like the sound of a violin travelling to your ear or the colours of a painting striking your retina, a paper note can be damaged or altered in transit or even fail to arrive at its intended address. As the late Parisian puts it, ‘dissemination mutilates the unity of the signifier’.

Emanuel de Carvalho’s exhibition begins with a postcard – sent to the artist by Catherine Malabou, the celebrated French philosopher and onetime student of Derrida. One side presents a grainy photo of the limestone cliffs and yacht-filled waters of the Calanque de Niolon, a little inlet near Marseille. And the other contains the image’s title and a brief handwritten message.

The postcard, as well as an old marble basin found near de Carvalho’s family home in Portugal, appear in the gallery as totemic artefacts. Both hold obscure messages: one in pen and ink, the other in its chiselled and worn-down fabric, a record of years of use. And both are in distinct ways objects of motion: one travelling across vast distances to reach its recipient, the other a conduit for water, soap and dirt, always passing through. In the exhibition, these different kinds of function and motion are suspended. The objects are suspended and partly concealed within box-like aluminium sculptures. The exhibition’s essence or origin is rendered inaccessible, leaving us to search for its traces.

Over the past three years, de Carvalho has been exploring the uneasy boundary between art and philosophy – flicking the postcard back and forth, as it were, between image and text.

More specifically, he has developed a sculptural and pictorial language that engages with concepts from continental, especially Derridean, philosophy. Alongside his studio practice, he also initiated a sustained correspondence with Malabou, exchanging emails, postcards, and even roughly sketched conceptual diagrams which formed the basis for his recent exhibition in Berlin.

The sculptures, for example, convey Derrida’s understanding of the ‘archive’ – an apparatus that conceals as well as preserving its contents, that asserts stasis and order on the past. And the pair of close-cropped portraits, with ever-so-slightly different formats and lighting, embody Derrida’s notion of différance: how meaning is not held within a single sign but formed through an endless deferral across associated signifiers. The viewer is unable to see either face fully or clarify the relation between the pictures. The eye moves between them, finding significance not in any individual identity (as in a heroic Renaissance portrait) but through the repetitions and differences between the two.

Despite his sincere interest in the complexities of continental philosophy, de Carvalho is ambivalent about the mechanisms through which knowledge is produced and disseminated. This comes through in his work. His metal sculptures often look like sinister pieces of lab furniture with their cold surfaces and razor-sharp edges. And his large paintings of hall-like interiors portray lecture theatres empty, dilapidated, and infused with details from abattoirs and abandoned industrial buildings.

Having been nourished at its formative stage by Derridean philosophy, in the last year de Carvalho’s work has taken on a greater independence. Its distinctive visual language seems to be following an ever-evolving logic of its own. His paintings have become looser, their forms and formats less consistent and less easily legible. And the sculptures include a wider range of materials, with different textures and translucencies interacting with each other. Now we can sense de Carvalho’s hands and body moving freely in the studio, his sensibility informed but not defined by the books on the shelf.

In this respect, his practice is aligned with Malabou’s belief in anarchy as a way to ‘govern without principle’ – to reject the classical Greek non of archē, which means both ‘origin’ and ‘rule’, to disentangle the oppressive connection between metaphysical truth and political power. Ironically, then, perhaps unavoidably, art leads back to philosophy…

Text by Michael Kurtz