Atlântica : Pedro Vaz
I think that if we live in a world where people have a less direct experience of nature, it is possible that, because of this deprivation, they do not know how to respond to nature. Perhaps we have lost a bit of the instinct or knowledge that was part of our ancestors' experience; we are less capable of identifying with it.
For more than ten years, Pedro Vaz has been exploring—through a non-anthropocentric, ecological, and integrated perspective—the relationship between contemporary man and nature. The artist has devoted part of his time to journeys through some of the best-known mountains and natural forests of Europe, transforming these immersive experiences and the union between body and nature into the leitmotif that permeates all his work. Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, and Switzerland are among the countries he has traveled through, covering, for example, approximately 180 km of the Tour du Mont Blanc [Lap around Mont Blanc] or the levadas of the highest mountains that traverse the Laurissilva forest on Madeira Island.
Interaction with the natural world, through a sensory experience imbued with subjectivity, has been crucial to the development of his practice—Vaz infiltrates nature, inhabiting it in silence, like a veiled, mysterious presence that goes unnoticed or is camouflaged by the vegetation. His status as an exploring wanderer makes him part of the very place itself. Each location, in turn, represents a discovery. Each journey, a story that provides him with a new and ever-renewed encounter with nature.
Atlântica, his first solo exhibition in Brazil, marks the beginning of a cycle of journeys throughout the country which, above all, leads us to the discovery of the Atlantic Forest, offering a journey as surprising as it is fascinating through the interior of the Sertão de Taquari, in Paraty, Rio de Janeiro. However, the title of the exhibition has a double reference: to the Atlantic Ocean—which separates (and connects) America and Europe, the New and the Old World—and to that tropical forest biome traversed by the traveling artists who took part in European artistic expeditions during the 19th and 20th centuries. Although it is far from a return to the past or an approach to the history of naturalistic painting in Brazil, Vaz does not fail to evoke a symbolic return to the time when painters such as Frans Prost, Johann Moritz Rugendas, and Jean-Baptiste Debret devoted themselves to the early records of Brazilian landscape painting.
The exhibition brings together recent works—mostly unpublished and specifically conceived for presentation in the Galpão at Baró Galeria—which include a series of large-scale paintings from which Vaz invites us to trace his footsteps and unravel the trails through mountains, canyons, waterfalls, and cabins shrouded by the various layers that compose each piece: “it is as if I were lending my eyes to the viewer.” Here, nature is not static, objectified into an inert form, but a world of forces in incessant movement, revealing the almost silent pulsation of the Atlantic Forest’s vegetation, which perishes and is continuously reborn.
Other works subvert the very concept of the idealization of nature and its representation, simultaneously deceiving the viewer—who is left in a state of perpetual uncertainty about what is seen. The Landscape Boxes (2015), at first glance, present a kind of enigma or visual ambiguity between the real and the artificial, the true and the false. In these works, nature appears imprisoned, confined, and incapable of escaping, as if the artist wished to remind us of the artificiality of a constructed, manufactured world dominated by objects, in which nature has also become a simulacrum and a simulated reality. This notion echoes the work of important names in Arte Povera (Giuseppe Penone, for example) and, conversely, also brings to mind the minimalism of Robert Morris and his Mirrored Cubes [Cubos espelhados, 1969], which, when displayed outdoors, reflect the surrounding landscape, setting nature against geometry.
The two videos on display, strategically installed in the room that serves as the anteroom to the exhibition, provide an initial encounter with the artist’s work—a preamble that introduces the visitor to the unfolding discovery of what is to come. Most importantly, they take us back to the very beginning. His video works unfold in multiple directions, interweaving documentary and fiction; they are the record of an evolving experience that precedes his paintings and sculptures, enhancing the relationship between man (body) and the natural world (nature). Nature is always present, as a symbolic protagonist that inspires something mystical, almost sublime—a backdrop for the artist’s coexistence with the natural environment.
For Pedro Vaz, a Portuguese artist born in Maputo, contact with the natural world emerges as a possibility for self-discovery and for reconnecting with nature within the context of contemporary urban-industrial society. However, does the very act of painting no longer presuppose a relationship with the object? How can one translate onto the pictorial plane the long span of coexistence between man and hidden nature? His work is not grounded in mere contemplation. In truth, it is imbued with a visual poetics that transcends the purely contemplative and idyllic realm of mere observation or the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure. What interests him is not a representation of nature as it manifests itself, but rather extracting the maximum from each encounter, from every experience with it. Regardless of the medium, his work captures the impression of something fleeting, transient—this elusive experience with nature—which makes his artistic practice unique within the context of the new generation of Portuguese artists.
Inês Grosso
July, 2015
