Thiago Rocha Pitta: O Ovo como uma Esfinge

Galeria Marília Razuk presents “The Egg as a Sphinx” (O Ovo como uma Esfinge), a solo exhibition by Thiago Rocha Pitta, with critical text by Camila Bechelany.

The exhibition brings together fresco paintings and watercolors, installations and sculptures, and seeks to deepen the artist's investigation of landscape as a living process, in constant transformation.

Since the beginning of his career, Thiago Rocha Pitta has developed a practice marked by careful observation of the subtle changes in the natural world, from the slow erosion of sand to atmospheric variations and the invisible dynamics that traverse matter. His work shifts the traditional notion of landscape as a static representation and understands it as a physical and temporal experience. As Camila Bechelany states, “far from the tradition of landscape as a stabilized image of the territory, his work operates from direct experience with natural materials and evokes temporalities that exceed the human scale.”

Among the languages featured in the exhibition, Thiago Rocha Pitta's fresco stands out. A technique that the artist mastered in Italy, where he studied its traditional procedures, fresco involves painting directly onto wet mortar, allowing the mineral pigment to chemically bond to the surface during the process. It is a method that requires precision, time, and mastery.

By incorporating fresco into his contemporary practice, Rocha Pitta activates a historical technique associated with permanence and memory, but places it in dialogue with his investigation into transformation. The pigments, integrated with lime, become a structural part of the surface, while small variations in humidity, temperature, and absorption produce unpredictable nuances. Thus, even in a millennial procedure, the artist maintains his stance as a mediator: “the elements that constitute the physical body of the works [...] are not treated as symbolic signs, but as active agents,” writes Bechelany.

By bringing fragments of the ever-changing world into the exhibition space, whether in sculpture, installation, or fresco, Rocha Pitta reinforces the idea that “the landscape is an event,” according to Camila Bechelany. The gallery thus becomes an extension of the natural environment, a field in which geological time, historical memory, and sensory experience intertwine.