Between being and nothingness

NÓS NUNCA NOS REALIZAMOS.

SOMOS DOIS ABISMOS – UM POÇO FITANDO O CÉU.

FERNANDO PESSOA

The end. What’s left of a rite in the moment that follows its realization? After the collective euphoria that suspends us of our usual itinerary on behalf of an intense present that we wish to enlarge, all melts into air, disintegrates, multiplies in small and dispersed pieces. In these moments, such as a static discharge, vibrant and luminous, we are fulfilled by an overcome feeling, reaching the peak of what we can be, but, unable to anchor ourselves in that high point, fall back again. Walking through the streets we encounter a scene that repeats every year: the tragical fate of Christmas trees. Stretched in the sidewalk, stacked assembled, their bodies are witnessing a complex process of material and symbolic disintegration. Misplaced from its site of craft – the Christmas dinners throughout the world – the trees lose their ornaments and lights, their verdant vitality, their vertical position, their dignity, finally: the trees lose their sense.

The Christmas trees don’t naturally fall respecting the natural cycle of the species; they don’t own anymore the roots that fixed them up in the soil, but rather the imprint of human intervention, straight and precise, which manufactured a new ground in order to place them upright, at our service, as if the trees were rooted in the middle of our living-room, fulfilling them with a false life. They no longer live as trees – domesticated by technique; in the after party, they die once again, now as symbols. They shatter slowly as fireworks, its trunks, elastic backbones, stretch to the fullest through the branches until they detach dotting the dark space with its luminous leaves: stars. The Christmas trees subsist as spectrum between being and nothingness, but what they really are? Trees? Symbols? What they reveal about ourselves?

The work assembles 3 individual photographs and 5 diptychs. They search a contrast in which visual rhymes can be found in the compositional structure of the figures that occupy the center of the images in relation to the background, at times, in the limits of abstraction. From the progressive disintegration of the Christmas trees, laid in the ground, to the explosion crystallized by the fireworks, in air, the same movement principle is highlighted: from the inside to the outside, from the denser to the subtler – dynamics that constitute the movement of the world. A materially uniform world that conceals the profound relations between terrestrial and celestial elements, an essential Harmony between opposed poles: between being and nothingness, between intense light and great darkness, between life and death, nature and technique. Filled with contradictions, man walks on this narrow line and makes it his home.