O Mármore e a Murta
2025
The marble statue is very costly to make, due to the hardness and resistance of the material; but once made, it requires no further intervention: it always preserves and maintains the same figure; the myrtle statue is easier to form, due to the ease with which the branches can be bent, but it must constantly be reformed and worked on to preserve it.
–Padre António Vieira, Sermão do Espírito Santo (excerpt)
This ongoing work questions the static becoming of sculpture and summons an aesthetic in motion. Through experiments with mineral (inert) and vegetal (organic) matter, I investigate the spontaneous transformation of the sculptural object over time. Thus, the inconstancy of form will depend on chronological and meteorological unfolding.
This exercise in applied spherology displaces the traditional role of the author, who is no longer the sole attributor of forms, in favor of an approach that mobilizes other methods of making sculpture. Instead of following exclusively human designs, the works in "O Mármore e a Murta" are informed by the alterity of vegetal agency and the accidents of geological matter.
The intersection between absent spheres and amorphous clumps exhibits the exuberant contingency of mineral sedimentation processes: from stratified polychromy to crystal formation, the negatives sculpted in stone reveal a temporal scale hardly comprehensible, were it not for its interpellation by the rhythm of the living.
Deposited on the concavity of the pieces, myrtle seeds (Myrtus Communis) patiently await the hatching granted by water. As time unfolds, vegetal growth will imply a negotiation between the sculpted fragment and spontaneous nature. The stone will serve as a mold for partial spheres, or will break in the face of the plant's perseverance.
In an ode to the real, these fifteen pieces place us before the impermanence of forms. By not preserving the figure attributed by the author's hand, their transformation over time reveals sculpture as an expanded field of forces. In a context of ineluctable change, the pretension of domination over matter ultimately reveals itself as vain. Between the solidity of stone and the insurgence of the vegetal, each work stages a process of continuous metamorphosis, where creation does not end in the initial gesture, but prolongs itself in the relationship with that which grows, erodes, and becomes extinct.
