Matheus Rocha Pitta: The Kingdom of Heaven

Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness's sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 5:10

 The series of gestures used in carrying out each of the functions and sacraments of a church is known as liturgy. A word of Greek origin, it indicates a kind of public service, work done by people in the name of others. In its ancient secular use, it meant any and all service on behalf of the people, and only in the second century did it come to qualify as the services of a cult, later understood as religious sacraments. In a liturgy, words or gestures are intimately linked, inseparable. They are part of a larger narrative, connected to signs and symbols in a limited way. Drawing on the strategy of disconnecting words from myths, and directing their attention to the ritualistic actions embodied in these fundamental narratives, the singularity of Matheus Rocha Pitta's production offers a gestural notion of the manifestation of bodies, and operates in art as a social fact.

The Kingdom of Heaven invests in the creation of a church on Rua Barão de Guaratiba in the Catete neighborhood, near the country’s former political headquarters, when Rio de Janeiro was the federal capital. Although the political tone of the images embedded by the artist on the prepared surfaces and cement slabs is urgent, the ceremonial nature of the gestures that punctuate this exhibition is the result of a research of through the mechanisms of exchange that govern daily life. The liturgy that emanates from the emergence of this church derives from the incorporation of the revolt itself, surrendered of dogmas. Matheus Rocha Pitta identifies the celestial atmosphere and the choreography of martyrdom and rebellion in the photos he collects, and establishes an ecclesiastical logic in space.

The gesture is an event, it is a drama in itself. There are gestures, excessively emphatic for the usual world, which point to a world outside themselves. If we understand politics as the absolute and integral sphere of man's gestures, then we are talking about a ritual presence of bodies, of spectral presence: that which lives despite death, gestures that point to a foreign world, to another circumstance.

What is a specter made of? Giorgio Agamben begins a paragraph from his essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living Among Specters, with a question like this. Spectrality is, above all, a way of life. A recurring author in Rocha Pitta's reading, Agamben offers a clue to understanding the complexity of the posthumous presence that the artist's pieces manage to exorcise. For the Italian philosopher, a specter is made of signs, marks, rubrics, encrypted names or monograms that time records of things. A specter presents itself as an intimately historical being. To death and to decomposition the spectral stage happens, the one that appears suddenly, issuing unbearable whispers to unaccustomed ears. It shows scarifications produced by history that will make sense only to those who have been intimate with them. A posthumous, complementary life. Everything already is, already has an end, or is over.

The recurrence, the symmetries, the rhythms, and other forms of regularity are literary strategies that poets use because they allow the subject the temporal dimension of the action. The cumulative effect of the images on the cross displayed at the beginning of this profane temple’s nave goes beyond a merely constructive resource of formal composition: the repeated use of the same image emits an incessant whisper. These are the ways in which poetic expression captures our attention, in the repetition of clenched fists. Its regularity produces a kind of reunion with something that, as it multiplies, reverberates in that which has already lived, producing pleasure. It should be remembered that the cumulative effect is a process intrinsic to the work of Rocha Pitta, in addition to the works presented here—dating back to the vast archive of images that the artist collects. Found on packs of cigarettes, the eyes on the cross that open the church were cut from packaging that warned of blindness from smoking. At their side, images of a protest in which a teacher is sprayed directly in the eyes are repeated in the cement plaster. The scene evokes martyrdom, with the man's body being immobilized by the brutality of the police. Held by his arms and neck, another officer directly reaches the man's eyes, like a sadistic look at an adulterated baptism.

Rocha Pitta’s procedure drains the informative value of the images of upheavals by repeating them and pulverizing them, and orients his observation to the form that constitutes them. In this archive of clear political relevance, we do not really know what the nature is of the thick cloud that permeates all these bodies. The tear gas not only lends drama to the scenes, which acquire a ghostly presence, but reveals a heaven materialized on earth. Immersed within a dense fog, fragments of bodies were captured in photographs and dematerialized in the light of the video. We are faced with four parallel narratives, presented in the same enclosure. Only limbs are seen, sometimes hands raised or clenched legs, anatomies in motion.

Matheus Rocha Pitta rearticulates the relationship between sign and referent, implying that the images are part of a larger picture, of an ongoing movement clearly set aside. What we don’t know about the image adds to the information we can learn from the repetition of the juxtaposition of the images. Protests, revolts, uprisings, insurrections. In shattered times, the videos invite us to identify, without success, who are those who reveal themselves in the midst of smoke curtains, giving to contemplation newspapers impregnated with spots of color, as in a sfumato.

Lined up on the floor of the room that inaugurates the church, glasses of wine have received drops of milk: the lactobacilli react and turn the wine into vinegar, from blood to antidote. In the center of the final room, instead of holy water, the basin contains magnesium milk. Both substances minimize the effect of the gas used to contain the masses. Floods of milk jets are squirted in the direction of an attack line of uniformed police in the image we see embedded in the center of one of the slabs of the exhibition. On the sides, pieces of milk cartons and magnesium stains. We read in the concrete, in careless disarray, an impossible word: "Take milk from your stone." We are no longer an audience, nor visitors, but an assembly.

Ulisses Carrilho