In an exhibition entitled “Sobre Natureza” (“On Nature”) at the Silvia Cintra gallery in Rio de Janeiro, Pedro Motta presents a declination in five groups around the same one reflection: the relationship that man has with nature. From the thoughtful vision of an intervention on a tree using eggshells, and, even more alarming, using wildlife stuck in what seems to be petrol and compressed behind the domestication to which man wishes to be subjected, Pedro Motta offered a variety of interpretations of his subject.
If the artist uses photography every aspect of what he is presenting, he is going well beyond the medium by elongating it through a very established assembly of each of the five groups and also through additions that he applies to the photographs, either being graphic or made with objects gravitating around photographs.
That is how the most important of the exhibition’s five groupings works, which he says approaches the relationship between nature and man under the prism of a relationship under conflict. Pedro Motta graphically intervened on forest photographs, created during a residency in Columbia over the course of 2015. On images of landscape and nature, he integrated illustrations representing two characters from the films of Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God), both maintaining a relationship with the Amazon. The landscape photographs, livened up with their graphite characters, are associated with frames presenting plastic plants covered in black paint, which seem suffocated, constrained behind their window pane. The artist proclaims to want to incorporate into this group “ a two-step recipe and make two distinct stories, but whose objective is to convene and talk about the transformations of nature, of their limits, and of their potential.”
The experiments in this photography display, both in a particularly thoughtful hanging and in the elongation that Pedro Motta gives to his images, allow the artist to go “beyond” photography’s simple representation and, thus, help him even more significantly to deploy his visual suggestions around the relationship between man and nature, whether it shows a conflicting link or a link revealing some fragility.
EXHIBITION
Sobre Natureza
Pedro Motta
Unitl June, 11th 2016
Galeria Silvia Cintra + Box 4
Rua das Acácias 104 Gávea
Rio de Janeiro
Brasil
+ 55 21 2521 0426
http://www.silviacintra.com.br/
Sobre Natureza
Pedro Motta
Unitl June, 11th 2016
Galeria Silvia Cintra + Box 4
Rua das Acácias 104 Gávea
Rio de Janeiro
Brasil
+ 55 21 2521 0426
http://www.silviacintra.com.br/
