A kaleidoscope holds two or more patterns at once. To me, Jade Cavalcante's 2019 piece, Duality, first reads as tyre tracks printed onto wet sand: deep grooves from the wheels of a quadbike in one clean pass, the edges scorched almost black and carrying the smell of burnt rubber. Then the page turns, and the tracks click into something else. The same marks fall into the curl of an unfurling young fern frond, set against the coarse fine hairs of more mature fronds. Another turn, and they're winter pines growing in the snow. Give it another turn and they become a timestamp photograph of camp bunkers, concentrated and set in rows, seen from directly above. Each image holds for a moment, sharp and whole, before the next one clicks into its place.
Notice the pattern once and you’ll keep gently noticing it. The same unhurried branching that shapes a river delta, fanning toward the sea from above, also shapes a single leaf, its veins splitting off the central rib. One logic repeating itself, evenly spaced and deliberate, shadowing a Fibonacci sequence. Cavalcante’s charcoal holds all three in one drawing, legible as more than one thing in the same fan of black marks.
Charcoal doesn’t hold a line the way ink does. It drags, smudges, and rubs on and off, but nothing here runs wild. Cavalcante directs both mediums with the sense of full control, and a hand that knows exactly where each stroke needs to land rather than fitting into a piece that has to bend bacl into the creator’s vision. Charcoal chalk embosses the moment it’s made its mark, and ink reinforces, supports and encourages the chalked lines. Whichever image is currently in focus arrives fully formed—said once and left to be—with no need for correction. I like seeing this type of confidence usually found directly from an artist’s sketchbook; it feels like the least interrupted line of communication between an artist’s inner monologue and their work.
It's like seeing the artist's idea at the moment it first lands on the drawing board. While its still running straight from the think-tank, before anything else tries to have a say or a go to inflate or shrink it to fit.
Made of charcoal and ink on white paper, Cavalcante’s drawing has something of the stark, graded range of an old sepia aerial photograph without dating itself to the past. A photograph fixes one instant, one vantage point, one current event, and begins to look like a historical account of one particular year. Cavalcante’s marks keep turning agelessly, never actually demanding from the viewer a definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Even though the piece itself is clearly black and white, the artist has allowed much room for the viewer to change their mind. Cavalcante’s work won’t scold the reader for changing their minds, either, and doesn’t demand that you see what they see. Tomorrow you could wake up and decide you see something else, and that’s perfectly fine.
The standout of the work is the certainty of its own artist’s hand. I look forward to seeing what else Cavalcante’s charcoal work has to show us.
More of Jade Cavalcante’s work can be seen on the artist's Instagram, @jade_cavalcan.te.