CARVALHO announces the fourth edition of its acclaimed performance series, positioning a collaboration with Paris-based artist, Guillaume Linard Osorio, and Israeli choreographer and contemporary dancer, Etay Axelroad. Linard Osorio’s commissioned, site-responsive installation imposes a charged scene for Axelroad’s latest choreography, Heron, opening Thursday, January 29, from 6–9pm, with a performance at 7:30pm. Following the premiere, the collaboration extends across a series of performances on February 6, 12, and 18, and March 6 and 11, culminating in its final iteration on Saturday, March 14, at CARVALHO’s 110 Waterbury St. space.

At the quantum level, matter is no longer solid. It is mostly empty space, held in place by invisible forces and constraints. Our perceived reality persists because form emerges from dynamics; the ephemerality of the flower and the permanence of the pyramids both spring from the same field of relations, not opposites but bound by differing scales and lifespans.

 

Here the synthesis between sculptor and choreographer—sculpture and dancer—mirrors the laws of the quantum field. The charged space between them induces a third, unfixed entity, making the empty space within the work as necessary as atomic emptiness. Each practice retains its integrity, its own language, and yet meaning arises through their mutual influence and resistance: the transient and the fixed briefly merge, imprinting upon one another.

Central to the collaboration is a shared inquiry into the thresholds of perception: a painting emanates into space, a body is extended by static material, movement lingers even when motion ceases. Light pours through polycarbonate surfaces, carrying the painted image beyond its assigned plot in the frame. The project unfolds as both performance and installation—an encounter between body, structure, light and movement. What emerges is a work that resists disciplinary boundaries, less a stage than a perceptual continuum.

Linard Osorio’s practice is rooted in architectural logic and physics. He uses polycarbonate, a material used for skylights, façades, greenhouses—spaces where form partners with illumination. In both his paintings and sculpture, polycarbonate is the canvas, though not a passive one. Paint is injected, manipulated through interior spaces, and allowed to travel according to the internal logic of the material itself. The result hovers between painting, stained glass, and the ominous glow of a digital screen, forming images that feel technological despite their handmade origins. Through the study of contemporary dance, Linard Osorio has undergone a tectonic shift in his practice, experiencing the body as an expressive instrument rather than a controlling one. Just as an architect considers ground, walls, and sky, the empty space between elements implicitly becomes a stage for the body. Movement entered his thinking and, therefore, his work.

Axelroad’s practice brings a complementary intelligence to the interchange. Trained in ballet and contemporary dance and shaped by Ohad Naharin’s Gaga technique—a dance style that is more experiential than technical, in which the dancer, in a distillation of intent, is asked to present purely what exists inside of him rather than inputting external, technical vocabulary. Likewise, Axelroad’s movement prioritizes sensation, responsiveness, and presence over fixed form. He moves with a jointless, liquid quality—strength encased in delicacy. His body reads space attentively, responding not only to gravity and structure but to light itself.

The disciplines create a hybrid form in which body and material negotiate space and luminosity together. The work also stages an unspoken tension between qualities often coded as oppositional: the defined, assertive geometry of metal and structure, alongside the softness, receptivity, and expansiveness of light and movement.

 

Linard Osorio’s sculptural 200 sq-ft, multi-paned installation is conceived in direct response to Axelroad’s physical needs as a dancer. The sculpture, permeated by beams of light and suspended by weeping chains, stands as the dancer’s opposite and complement. Gargantuan by comparison, it acts simultaneously as partner, stage, and womb, containing the illusion of permanence that allows the dancer’s transient presence to take form.

 

Axelroad’s movement alters the atmosphere, creating an aura that expands far beyond the parameters of the body, enveloping the installation, scaling it, surrendering to it and giving its presence layered meaning. He responds to illumination as both stimulus and constraint, feeding off light as much as gravity, complicating binaries of masculinity and femininity, force and yield. Both artists ask us to bear witness to where things begin and where they end. Like atoms in the quantum field: the work holds together precisely because it is relational, dynamic, and never fully solid.

 

Text by Cynthia Dragoni, a New York-based arts and culture writer and producer. Dragoni is the creative director of The Dance Lens, a platform featuring interviews and podcasts at the intersection of the performing arts, culture, and politics.