TORSCHLUSSPANIK

bodies eat the distance
Written by Fiona Glen

The gate is open and the hills beyond are rippling. Light splits into bright live segments of a lurid and lobed fruit. Every layer in the earth is a crawling thing, a ragged animal of silt and mineral, strung into topographies of transformation. In Carlotta Roma’s Torschlusspanik, the surface was made to shift. This is unstable ground: a world rendered open, protean; a cell-splitting epic that leans full-bodied against fixity.

If this show is a terrain, it warns us of zones where radiant waste hums under the soil like memory and symbols outlast their legibility. Regions where energy masses, clusters and concentrates. If this show is a landscape, you must sense the signals that seep from it like uncanny heat, and discern the summoning beacon from the warning sign. If this show is a site of dreams and hazards, then you can only navigate it by interpreting the clues that glow in surreal (un)earthly pigment, getting warmer as you go.

In 2023, Roma travelled across New Mexico, over lands that reverberate with the histories of secret nuclear testing. Unspoken and unseen, hot spots of radiation breathe out from deserts, dosing earth and air and rain and bodies, dissipating quietly through the decades. Lodging ghostlike in innocent objects – leaving ghostly clouds on sensitive film – passing through the humans who were not warned, and the animals who never could have been.  

Legacies of mutation wriggle beneath Roma’s canvases, where every figure is a multiple being and even objects are slippery anchors, easily misread. We are always more than singular selves, and while we fear losing our footing and our boundaries, an anxiety can also take root when we are held back from the change which constitutes animacy. To be fixed in one form is to cease living and become an image – the kind of death that painting specialises in sanctifying, and which Roma seeks to subvert. 

Hers is a restless world, congealed rather than constructed, baring the process of its making with raw material honesty. Torschlusspanik animates George Bataille’s infamous call for an art of the formless, the evasive, the low. But the openness of Roma’s images does not discount their bodiliness. Her figures are weighty, assured in their uncertainty, both solid and fluid, nearly marine. Here are organs that become weird architectures, marked by cleaved rubber ridges and tentacular reach. Here, even the gullet is not a single channel but a forking path, and we cannot know whether we are observing or encased within these caverns of flesh. 

After all, the idea of inside and outside can feel obsolete in a world of exchange, circulation and pollution, when a little bit of everything is inside us and the trace of our passage is everywhere. These forms are roused by Stacy Alaimo’s transcorporeality, the understanding that all creatures... are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them. 

Roma’s paintings emerge from this uneasy entanglement – a reality in which our porous bodies are not entirely our own, and never were. In Torschlusspanik, we are on the threshold between the weight of meaty matter and the invisible creep of chemicals that can rewrite life with the slightest touch. These bodies are intoxicated, just as they are in a biosphere undergoing a violent metamorphosis of its own. A place where, in Daisy Hildyard’s words, we are always all over the place, where each body is involved with every other living thing, where bodies are breaking into one another [and yours] has already eaten the distance. 

Our age is shaped by this dawning awareness – call it horror – of our molecular-level mutability. But an understanding of our bodily instability is an ancient thing, no matter how suppressed. It already squirms in every myth, every frenzied prophecy, every story of metamorphosis that saw men transformed into dolphins and cockroaches, and women into trees and birds. In Torschlusspanik, ancient anxieties sit side by side with the markers of our present. An archaeology of myth can be a brazen mirror. Some things decompose while others reemerge again and again. 

This is both a tunnel leading into occulted soils and an excavation, gesturing to everything we bury and the unevenness of how it breaks down. The obsessive inquiry muttered under these works: what endures, what persists, what haunts us through our own transience and forgetful time?

Even pigments drag along their histories – lineages of extraction, toxicity, transmogrification, risk. Colour cultivated and mined at any cost; colour with the power to speak for us; colour a trickster actor. Roma’s pigments hold a code of their own, each hue a suspect cipher, an often-alchemical reference to be read many ways. Discomfiting purples and rich, ultimate reds. Green as a screen for transportive fantasies, or a scapegoat for radioactive danger. The artist’s ambiguous system resonates with the cryptic colour philosophy of the poet Lucy Mercer when she writes: Here is the Redness that brings greenness. Here, in the portals of Torschlusspanik, we might find Mercer’s semtext explosion of organs / whenever the grass restructures / our purple reins.

Beneath sense runs another kind of communication. Undercurrents, under-thoughts, under-goings. Inscrutable energies, asking to be scried. Ripples in the infra-specific and tremors across millennia. Meaningful vibrations under revelatory light. Listen close and you might hear the shuffle of chalk against boards, the suck and crackle of a populous rockpool, the rustle of a disappearing wing, the grind of tooth on tooth. Wavelengths wander off course like lines of regret, like paths not taken. 

Opening up her paintings like questions, Roma asks how we might speak through deep time, beyond the power of a language to survive. And so, her lands host animate artefacts, fantasies rusted into wild new forms, and fossils that reveal their hidden scrolls under just the right frequency. Shivering between emergence and decay, between the greenness and the redness, is the grammar of light in which Roma has written a hallucination of earthly being. Torschlusspanik is a gateway is a field is a harbour, a homing ground for all that refuses to rot and the life that resists and resists, endlessly remaking itself. 



To accompany the exhibition, here is a poem by Io Worthington.