Herança

The piece “Show, Atlas/Océano” was developed during an artistic residence program celebrated in Norway in 2014, through the Circulating Air program. The artist appropriates a mythological character in order to name and create a work in which the current problems of his work are explored. It is tackled as an extended experience of temporality and the boundaries of the relationship the man is able to establish with nature. The mythological universe and literature are constant references in Thiago Rocha Pitta’s work (as in “O cómplice secreto y Juventud”, where the artist borrow titles and topics from Joseph Conrad). However, the allusions of these sets created by Rocha Pitta are neither unequivocal nor limited by their original sense. The elements and human characters transfigure themselves into mineral, sometimes vegetal forms. Even the elements inherent to the technique and culture (such as the navigation or the mastery of fire) move along these videos, featuring as ghosts, mysterious creatures unable both to happen and to come from a human force. The camera, sometimes static, others drifting, places the spectators in an odd voyeur position towards our world.

The ship is present as well in his work. Three of his pieces contain this element in the Gallery’s first floor: “Tribute to JMW Turner” (2002), with a ship on fire somewhere out in the ocean, a clash between fire and water; “Herança” (2007), with a drifting boat carrying a handful of sand and two trees, an ironic and dreamlike image full of loneliness; and “The Secret Accomplice” (2008), where a brilliant shape whose precise contour reveals itself difficult to understand gets closer to the camera/viewer in the ocean, bringing about darkness and an increasing tension. In “Atlas/Océano”, it is not the sea that carries the boat, but just the opposite. This fragile wood structure represents Atlas, the one responsible for holding Earth while floating in the emptiness. Coming from the technical mastery of human above nature and associated with the blossom and expanding of countless civilizations, the ability to navigate appears here as the world’s supporting point. In connection with the image’s resonance, the artist argues that nature does not exist for humankind: like Midas, everything touched by the hand of the human being gets transformed into culture, even in the desert.