Heritage (014)

European solo debut of Thiago Rocha Pitta (b. 1980, Tiradentes, MG Brazil), featuring the premiere of his latest work, Heritage. Thiago Rocha Pitta has been heralded for a sublime aesthetic employment of nature in his work. While his artistic output is not confined to a specific medium, one can nevertheless escape the romantic in his encounters with landscape. Contrived or otherwise, his works point to a search for the relation between art and nature. In “Abyss beneath Abyss” – 2001, the artist had himself photographed on a platform of mirrors rising up above the gorge of a steep cliff in Rio de Janeiro. The sky and his torso are reflected on the mirror’s surface. In the distance below lies a poor quarter. In the film, “Homage to William Turner” – 2004, a boat is slowly set aflame upon the dirty waters of the Bay of Guanabara. Here, the artist’s reference is explicit – to the painting “Burial at Sea” by the late British master. German and English Romanticism at the turn of the 18th to 19th centuries lent passion and fear to the concept of nature which science had previously restricted to an object of study. Giving oneself up to the adventure of natural landscape not only means returning to the place of our origins, but also to the possibility of recognizing both our insignificance and our magnificence. Today, nature is inseparably associated with a world man has destroyed. Thiago Rocha Pitta shows us that there is no room left for nostalgia or a return to pre-Modernist days.