Focus: Matheus Rocha Pitta

A slab of reinforced concrete leans against the wall. Numerous fragments are encrusted onto its surface: tiles and red brick; a yellowed newspaper cut-out about the sale of the rubble from a demolished building in Rio de Janeiro for one Brazilian real; just beneath that, the enlarged image of the coin. The surface of the slab has two different shades of grey, roughly outlining the form of an hourglass. However, rather than smoothly trickling sand, it looks as if rubble and news clippings are tumbling lopsidedly through its neck, suggesting chronological disturbance.

Positioned at the gallery entrance, this piece served as a kind of calling card to Matheus Rocha Pitta’s show earlier this year at Rio’s Paço Imperial, entitled ‘Dois Reais’ (Two Reals). The artist made no explicit reference to the Imperial Palace’s history as the residence of 18th-century colonial governors, and 19th-century kings and emperors (today it is a cultural centre). And yet he made use of the building’s aura by sharply contrasting it with that of an entirely different one: a wing of Rio’s University Hospital that had been left unfinished, and nicknamed ‘Perna Seca’ (Dry Leg). Conceived during the 1950s heyday of Brazilian architectural Modernism, the dramatically oversized wing had remained a vandalized ruin and was recently demolished.

To Rocha Pitta, who was born in 1980, and has been living in Rio since 1998, the Perna Seca has been a fascinating symbol of Brazil’s continuing efforts to modernize. As early as 2002, he took a photograph of a chalk graffito he found there: a transparent die, with the dots on each of its six faces showing through.

The sale of the heap of debris resulting from the building’s demolition to a recycling company, for the symbolic amount of one real, prompted the artist to ask that company to temporarily divert three truckloads of rubble out of that cycle. The show’s title, ‘Dois Reais’, can be understood simply as the monetary amount of two real (as if the artist had symbolically doubled the already symbolic payment), but also as two ‘reals’: two realities.

Indeed, it was as if two or more realities had been superimposed. The provisional white cube of the palace’s former servants’ quarters had been created by covering up window arches with panel sheets and adding freestanding walls. But rather than tearing down these elements to reveal what’s underneath (in the manner of Michael Asher), Rocha Pitta used them as props to stage a scenario of hidden recesses. Plastic-wrapped gravel from the Perna Seca was piled behind fake walls, with narrow doors left ajar. One couldn’t help but think of smuggled goods – in the vein of earlier works by Rocha Pitta such as Drive Thru #2 (2009), which involved pieces of disassembled cars stored in a false wall. Similarly, in Drive Thru #1 (2007), the artist – during a residency in Austin, Texas – ‘confiscated’ land and packaged ordinary dirt in plastic foil like drugs, photographing it in car headlights in front of a fence, just like the trophy photos meant to prove successes in the fight against drug trafficking.

And, as with smuggled goods, one question springs to mind: Is there more? One truckload of gravel had been used for the described scenario; another two for a process-based sculptural experiment that had taken place earlier but in the same space, documented on video. One of these comprised chunks of stone or red-brick laid out on newspapers on the floor like forensic findings, while the other involved builders trickling gravel down fold-out tables stacked on top of one another, like a strange meditation halfway between sandbox and archeological site.

Rocha Pitta plays allusions to recycling and confiscation off one other. What is in circulation and what is taken out of it? What is remembered and what is forgotten? These questions affect not only the current clean-up actions in the run-up to the 2014 football World Cup in Brazil, and the 2016 Olympics in Rio – of which the Perna Seca’s demolition was part – but more generally the urge to ‘clean up’, to abandon seeming historical ballast in order to become an economic world leader.

Yet while Rocha Pitta’s work may imply such far-reaching questions, he doesn’t pretend to be piously aloof from the production of art objects.I ask him what inspired his decision to adopt the curious technique of pouring concrete onto findings, a hybrid of cast and collage. He tells me it is based on a common, cheap way to cover graves:if you can’t afford marble or travertine, you use a concrete slab instead.In order to prevent the poured concrete from sticking to the wooden casting mould, the latter is laid out with old newspaper, which thus inevitably becomes part of the underside of the slab as the paper is fixed in place by the hardening concrete. The dark joke is, of course, that the dead will have something to read. Correspondingly, even in the ‘dead’ art object, crucial insights might still be encapsulated, and wait to be unearthed.