“The landscape is tormented by infinity”
Jean-Marc Besse, Ver a terra, 2006.
Francesco Petrarca inaugurates the aesthetic literature of landscape with his brief epistolary account of the ascent of Mont Ventoux. From the summit, he could observe the vastness of the regions that his vision could reach. As has already been said, there is something profoundly modern in this account that has to do with a naturalist quality in Petrarch’s gaze. If the author’s parameters for giving meaning to this gaze bear resemblance to a tradition of seeing the world within the divine order, the need to look at it frankly, highlighting the experience of the body, is a cause for anguish that denotes the shaking of this tradition. In any case, it is interesting that the sensitive experience of the landscape leads to a situation of thought. From the letter of the 14th-century Italian poet, I recover some points that help to guide the view on characteristics of Marcelo Moscheta’s work in its relationship with the landscape.
The awareness of something impregnable in nature, an immensity that spills over into the possibility of the sensible and can only be sensed as a relationship with infinity, is one of these points. And this awareness leads inwards to a reflection on the outside, to delimit a distance that will always be insurmountable, but which in Moscheta's works is equalized in the constant movement between belonging to nature and its observation. Petrarch, faced with the opposition between interior and exterior, seeks in Saint Augustine a solution to the impasse of his anxieties about the will to know by stepping back from the choice of the vision of the world and recognizing the value of truth in the soul, in the greatness of interiority. In Mosqueta, occupying space and reflecting on occupation are continuous actions; being is moving between the sensible and the intelligible.
His work recovers something of this act of creating a landscape, a space, a place that, as a fragment of reality, is both a way of looking at reality and a way of looking at oneself, an essential division that the landscape creates and deepens in our fissure as nature and culture. If this fissure and the questioning it provokes is inevitable in landscape, in Moscheta's work there is a constant search for ways to both deal with the fissure and transform it into something that, in the fluid and experimental panorama of contemporary art, resembles a desire for landscape. It is perhaps less about saying landscape, but about exploring the anxieties, the contradictions, of problematizing the exercise of being before nature, without the naivety of rejecting the instrumentalized gaze of culture, which is needed to think about human action on nature and the processes of art. However, if there is no naivety, neither does the awareness of distance prevent him from seeking, in the very cracks of the fissure, in his always tense drawing, the way back to a dazzlement, an astonishment with that to which we belong, without being able to encompass or properly name it.
Regarding the work “Rejeito”, the tension can be felt in the light appearance of the dry foliage, in the revolted and cushioning layer of the organic material and in an entropic or cyclical character that, in the body of the work, contrasts with the sculptural material. The clues take on other contours in the weight felt in the foliage revealed in clay, in the geometric organization that recalls the work of Carl Andre and in the concentration of energy that suggests permanence.
It is understandable that some aspects of your research are linked to the sense of territorial limits that, at times, can take as reference naturally established separations, such as rivers. Your works on geographic and political borders could be read as doubles of this other, more subtle confrontation between the discontinuity of the discovered individual, which in your consciousness is no more than a cutout, a frame, and the continuity of life that can only be perceived in time, which crosses us not as a line, but as infinite ramifications and intersections, a river erotic. Your movement across the earth also creates imaginary and real lines, in the erasure of walking on the ground and in the projection of travel routes. Something indefinable about this practice is still a continuous act of drawing that, in order to exist, almost always requires the transformation of point into line, friction.
The painting “Every stone is a small mountain” emphasizes this aspect of time, invisible borders and transformation. In part, due to the movement of matter that marks the geographical characteristics of the region, in its being stone, something immutable, in its cyclical processes that are not capable of corrupting anything of its essence. On the other hand, we can suppose that the stone itself, as a geographical accident, is part of these fluid borders, like the surface of human transits and their protection, which we feel in the rawness of the virgin lime that he writes in the Mirandese language.
This way of Moscheta dealing with nature escapes the order of the culture of the modern subject, classifier, inventory taker, archaeologist, who appears reinvented in his work.
