Thiago Rocha Pitta

[Tiradentes, 1980. Lives and works in São Paulo]

In his essay entitled “Sobre como domesticar o imprevisível”, published on the occasion of the show Notas de um desabamento, by Thiago Rocha Pitta, held in 2010 at the Cavalariças da Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, in Rio de Janeiro, Felipe Scovino suggests that “Pitta’s work is always manifested as a landscape painting, regardless of the support he works with or the sense of invention he constructs”. And he goes on to state that it is “a landscape that changes at the same time that this painting asks itself if it continues being painting or enlarges the artist’s research into other fields of poetic production”. The possibility of mobilizing the theme of landscape paintings in the field of contemporary art and within the context of the exhibition Além da Vanguarda is one of the interests of this curatorship, as it has to do with a genre that has occurred throughout the history of the Bienal Naïfs do Brasil.

Here, we present Rocha Pitta’s video Herança [Heritage], where we see a small wooden boat that forms a nearly surrealist image, carrying a pair of trees in the midst of the high seas. Sometimes closer or farther away from the camera that records it, this unusual assemblage of boat-and-trees floats adrift, without a course or any intention of reaching land, since it constitutes, in itself, a territory. We follow its drifting course without any expectation for the closing of a narrative, allowing ourselves to be carried along by the duration of the event itself. Our interest is engaged only by the changes in framing caused by the relative distance or nearness of the boat. Nevertheless, it continues floating as an enigmatic offering, full of a symbolism that we are not able to decipher.

Scovino calls attention to the economy of images in the work of Rocha Pitta, and to how his suppression of the excess of external “noises” allows for the appearance and manifestation of an interior, intimist story. In the case of Herança, what he adds to the traditional representations of landscape is only the temporal datum, which asks for a moment of contemplation in the unfolding of the present time.