Mars meets Venus
(The meaning of images is the magical context of reversible relations.
Vilém Flusser)
Introducing the work of Márcio H. Mota is not an easy task. The artist deals with multiple procedures and interests, manipulating the image either technological or culturally. There is a clear fetishistic fascination joining technology and illusionism, mass culture and contemporary aesthetics. The work, in its procedures, reproduces the behavior of light and expands in all directions.
One can think of Robertson's phantasmagoria shows, of Bruno Corra's Futurist chromatic music, of Naimark and Bill Lundberg's film installations, of Tony Oursler's hallucinogenic dramaturgy or of Zaven Paré's marionettes. "Art, for me, binds itself with the labyrinth of mind. And what I do is to go through labyrinths to provide other ones", says Mota.
The basic material for erecting such labyrinths are the primal human impulses. Their symbols revolve around the American mass culture. The method is the deconstruction or reorganization of such structures. The intention is to objectify magic.
In this poetic evocation of light, these elements, different at first sight, acquire a somewhat spectral appearance when amalgamated on a stand. The Coca-Cola bottle is illuminated from the inside by Rambo movie scenes, desecrating the pop icon with machine gun shots. American action movie scenes are reduced to a horizontal line of pixels expanded into a chromatic screen, in an editing guided by the soundtrack of screams, gunfire and explosions. The hero’s dramatic narrative is mixed to a porn movie’s one. The moans of pleasure confuse and transform this kind of abstract cinema into martial ecstasy. Religious images mixed with erotic rituals pulse in light beams inside a bottle with incense smoke. Weeping, wailing and dog barking evoke the ghostliness of our interior, recalling that the mass feelings inspired by the war are close to those awakened by religion. The contestatory conservatism is revealed in the rambling monologue of a plaster doll. A choreography of explosions as little deaths. And a silent and immaterial ballerina in the smoke of this labyrinth. Memory, delirium or illusion.
Contained in a bottle or projected into water vapor, these images become the fragmented narrative of a dream or the materialization of a talisman.
Gisela Domschke