The archaeology of the landscape and natural phenomena, mainly the geological one and that of the decomposition of things, has been a leitmotiv of research and representation by several contemporary artists. The rediscovery of nature – not only in its procedural or logical properties, but also in its mystical ones –, as well as the awe it causes, is the catalysts of lots of works which drive the spectator in to these primeval and cosmological moments, both creative and destructive.

Marcelo Moscheta resumes these themes in A História Natural e Outras Ruínas [Natural History and Other Ruins] and shows us a series of compositions and installations that transform and almost deify the natural phenomena and the landscape modified through the human genius. The works are an attempt to turn into iconography the metamorphosis veiled to the human experience, perhaps due to the exponential disinterest regarding Nature and ecology.

Melancholia, for instance, is a piece which displays a number of bronze fragments that came from a fictitious meteor. There seems to be a double attempt to exhibit the cosmological process – and in some cases the cosmogonic process, given the fascination suggested in ancient civilizations – and to remember, even though not explicitly, the movie with the same title by Lars von Trier, which was simultaneously a representation of an individual panacea for depression and the salvific terror of an immense comet colliding with the planet Earth, destroying it.

A História Natural e Outras Ruínas, by Marcelo Moscheta, is being displayed at Galeria Vermelho, in São Paulo, Brazil, until 23 June.