The Silvia Cintra + Box 4 gallery is pleased to announce Jardim Impostor, Pedro Motta’s solo show, from August 15 to September 14, 2019. In its fourth exhibition at the gallery – Natureza Concreta (2008), Espaço Confinado (2013) , Sobre a Natureza (2016) – Motta presents three series that explore the concept of garden: Jardim Oculto, Erva Daninha e Geração Espontânea. The title of the exhibition, Jardim Impostor, was taken from one of the texts of the author’s last book, Natureza das Coisas, published by Ubu Editora, in 2018.

Jardim Oculto (2019) is intrinsically related to the Sumidouro (2016) and Naufrágio Calado (2016-2019) series, which also deal with the theme of bankruptcy, ruin, and something that fades away. In this work, Pedro Motta leverages his imagination to create a sculpture garden, a garden hidden in a limestone cave originating from a series of geological processes of remote ages. Mimicked inside the Peter Lund State Natural Monument – Maquiné Cave are sculptures of prophets made by Aleijadinho at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century.

The cave is a spontaneous ruin, sculpted by water and time and, by itself, a sculpture produced by the action of nature. Already the prophets were carved in soapstone by the hands of man. In this sculpture garden, cultivated, thought, elaborated by the artist, two different narratives, from different times and rocky materials intertwine. It is a landscape built, altered, recreated. This fantastic narrative reveals a new world to be discovered, a new culture that is somehow also in a state of bankruptcy, as if accumulating ruins of the past in recreated time and space.

In Erva Daninha (2019), Pedro Motta presents a dynamic collection of plants collected from an intimate and affective garden. This fantastic herbarium is made up of weeds, spontaneously born, often undesirable plants that can negatively interfere with the aesthetic space of the garden, which tends to be a delightful place of delight. It is the cataloging of plants of daily read and with specific structures of interest of the artist, photographed with a pictorial aesthetic charge. The methodology is to observe the growth and development of herbs in your own garden. Subsequently, the artist harvests these plants and sets up distinctive floral arrangements that are then photographed in the studio. Then the plants are exposed to the weather for one to three days until they lose their vitality. They are then re-photographed in the same positions and light conditions. Finally, the images of living plants and droughts are arranged in the same space, so that they lead the observer to a game of associations in search of the corresponding image.

The Geração Espontânea series (2019) is part of a previous experiment that resulted in the objects – artificial plants, painted black and exposed in black boxes – by Flora Negra (2015-2016). In the current work, Motta also rearranges artificial but green plants, as if alive, within confined spaces, black boxes that simulate charred environments. In these veiled frames open cracks through which different species of plants escape, escaping from imprisonment. Symbolically, nature’s life force breaks the confinement, restoring the possibility of life, but in an irregular, unlikely, unstable way. Like unplanned weeds anywhere, weeds puncture the surfaces of the frames, create cracks, and come to life spontaneously and uncontrollably. The series continues the discussion of the relationship between the interventions of man’s actions and nature, present in much of the artist’s production.

KHL