Matagal grows without asking permission. It bursts through cracks, vacant lots, ruins and fractures in the asphalt, along the edges of backyards and sugarcane fields. It is called mato (wild growth) precisely because it does not conform to spaces that are landscaped, planned, and exploited. Where the garden relinquishes control, where the city’s plan fails, where the land, depleted by mining and monoculture, is abandoned as waste, matagal spills over, embracing what is cast aside: weeds, wild plants, and life forms that escape order, design, and domestication. Figuratively, matagal means a tangle, a state of disorder and confusion. Yet this entanglement is not a remnant, but an exuberant proliferation of life, the vitality of wounded earth that, even after devastation, persists in germinating and regenerating.
Matagal is the title Louise Ganz gives to this series of paintings made in the Cerrado, in the Serra do Espinhaço, a region that forms part of Minas Gerais’ Iron and Aquifer Quadrangle. The paintings in Matagal emerge from walks through rocky grasslands, ironstone outcrops, and riparian forests; from visions of a wounded, dreamlike territory where dream and matter blur into one another; from literature and art history, which reverberate as an archive of ways of seeing, narrating, and imagining; and from aerial views captured by satellites and mineral geoinformation platforms.
In these paintings, made with acrylic, gouache, oil, and pigments derived from collected earth, horizons intertwine. They pose questions about ways of inhabiting and living within a territory marked by the violence of extractivism, but also shaped by water, life, and competing regimes of vision that contend over the meaning of the world and of life itself. Painting becomes a way of thinking through worlds in collapse, but also a means of imagining their continuity.
Four regimes of visuality thus come into tension, forming a web of times and scales, materials and forces that unsettle crystallized ways of making the world legible.
The first is the tradition of pictorial landscape: the construction of an ordered visual field. Perspective organized the visible from the viewpoint of a sovereign observer, subjecting the world and its escapes to a horizon of its own making, forging both a connection and a distance between the body that looks and the space offered to its gaze. The second is the aerial vision of mining cartography: the earth no longer appears as a scene, but as an operational surface. Seen from above, it becomes measurable, delineable, quantifiable. If landscape and perspective framed the world, georeferencing captures and extracts it. From above, cartography’s geometric gaze cuts the mountain’s skin into triangles and squares, reducing the earth to a commodity. From below, amid pits, lichens, and roots that persist in sprouting through cracks, the body is thickness, contagion, and flow. The third regime is therefore that produced by the artist’s walking body and its tactile, encompassing gaze, attentive to fissures, metamorphoses, and mixtures. The fourth regime is subterranean: that of devoured lands and waters flowing beneath the image, an invisible dimension and hidden current that sustains life.
If pictorial landscape once organized the world for the gaze, matagal implicates the gaze in the world. If the map divides the earth into commodities, the body discovers relationships. What emerges is a gaze that rejects the mechanisms of control and probes the friction among multiple forces. An entangled gaze, capable of embracing what flourishes despite the operations that drain worlds of vitality in order to subject them to consumption.
Matagal thus introduces another regime: the entangled gaze. It neither organizes nor separates nor simplifies. It is an epistemology of entanglements, of relationships that intertwine, species that intermingle, and vitalities that elude domestication. Matagal embraces that which overflows, resurfaces, and survives; that which persists in living beyond taxonomies and totalizing systems of order.
Such painting could not help but bear the wounds of our times. The climate crisis, environmental catastrophe, and predatory capitalism do not appear as illustrations, but as tensions running through the very constitution of the image. Layers of paint accumulate like sediment; brushstrokes revisit wounds; gestures collide, retreat, and advance; fields of color vibrate as forms dissolve. The painting renders perceptible a territory simultaneously marked by destruction and survival. The Anthropocene is not a landscape to be contemplated from a distance, but a lethal rupture in the relationships that weave together all that exists: people, matter, and images. Matagal is neither a subject nor a pictorial genre; it is the very condition of a painting that recognizes that worlds do not preexist the encounters through which they are constituted.
There is, therefore, something both devastating and insurgent about matagal. What extractivism kills or attempts to reduce to a resource returns in a state of immanent indocility: vegetation growing through fissures, water flowing underground, earth rejecting its status as available matter, and massacred yet surviving peoples who continue to resist, refusing submission. Matagal introduces another temporality: that of lives that do not conform to the rhythms of exploitation.
It is no coincidence that Louise Ganz incorporates into her paintings earth and stones collected during her walks. The violated mountain reappears as pigment, as the very flesh of the painting. This is not a matter of transforming a supposed “natural material” into artistic matter, but of producing assemblages in which earth, stone, water, plant, gesture, pigment, and painting bring one another into being. The Serra do Espinhaço and the Cerrado do not stand before the painting, nor are they merely its referent: they participate in the emergence of the world the painting brings forth. Their fragments carry geological memories, histories of violence and scars, but also of regeneration.
Matagal thus questions the boundaries that the modern gaze has labored to draw: between the living and the nonliving, organism and matter, nature and culture, subject and world. Stone is not inert; earth is not mute; water is not a commodity; wild growth is not a lesser form of life. Together with painting, they form an ecology of connections and mutual affects that the image seeks to make visible. The Serra do Espinhaço emerges in these paintings not as an extractive reserve, but as a presence; not as an object, but as an agent participating in the very fabric of worlds.
Marisa Flórido
