Rodrigo Braga Manaus, Brazil, 1976

Reinventing the still-life genre, Braga creates images and situations by mixing materials such as leaves, stones, bones, flesh, and carcasses of animals that defy the common perception of what’s natural and what’s cultural, of what’s real and what’s built. Some of his main exhibitions are the 30th São Paulo Biennial (2013); Extreme, at the Maison Européene de La Photographie, in Paris (2010); and More force than necessary, an individual show held at the Flanders Fields Museum, in Ypres, Belgium (2010). He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

De natureza passional
2014, video, 12’50”
courtesy of Galeria Vermelho and the artist
Mentira repetida
2011, video, 5’20”
courtesy of Galeria Vermelho and the artist
Sem título (pedra e árvore)
2012, photograph, 60x90cm
courtesy of Galeria Vermelho and the artist

Although they were not conceived as a set, the three works brought together in this exhibition are representative of part of Rodrigo Braga’s production, which has been coherently and systematically reflecting on the relations between nature and culture in photographs and video performances. De natureza passional and Mentira repetida, in which the artist performs in the woods, relate to the forest as a possible place of foster and shelter, whereas Untitled (rock and tree) records a moment of the slow and silent encounter between a rock and a trunk that grows over it.