Opening up trails, paths, roads. Forging ahead is paramount. Or is it? In insisting on expanding his own patch of land, man splits, constructs and moulds the landscape. In the transition from what the landscape has been to what it will become, traces gather as remains remain. Great monuments constructed in honor of absolutely nothing.
Amorphous volumes of a landscape which has, in the process of being transformed, lost what it originally was without taking on a logical form or acquiring a new function. The severed, naked earth suddenly reveals its formerly-secret layers of sediment which scrawl, sketch and color in improbable textures. Land in sight!
This problem-landscape with its abandoned banks seems to cry out for meaning, for a new sense to free it from the extraordinary appearance which civil engineering's grotesque attitude has forced upon it. Even though this anti-aesthetic, useless landscape, ripped from its origins to be subject to raw, cruel exposure does not feature in our contemplation of the beautiful and has no social function, it does not remain silent, its size unnoticed.
It was precisely this outcry, this murmur emitted from the wilds and their exposed scars which triggered artist Rodrigo Zeferino's creative process. The landscape's paradox, transformed as it is to a raucous monument to absolutely nothing, is a starting point for the artist to perceive this interrupted cycle of meaning and to carry it forward pushing in turn the limits of photographic language so that, finally, the landscape finds a representation which affirms its place in the world.
In the world? Yes, in the infinite and individual symbolic and imaginary world which Zeferino gradually constructs and reveals to us in his series which cumulatively present in a most original and unexpected manner the collision between light and its effects on the earth. Or is it about the earth - considering that at the core of his work is the capacity to produce a microcosm of the apparently banal in the poetic perception of the universe on a macro scale? To represent this individual, stellar, fantastic world, Zeferino creates strategies which "magicalise" the landscape. The radical interventions made by engineering in violently sculpting the earth find a correlation in the artist's use of photography. One transgression is superimposed upon the other, as Zeferino then goes on to somewhat transgress from photography's standard codes.
The Images from Severed Earth are far from being the mechanical and respectful records landscape photography generally affords to monuments. The photography operates within this cycle of meaning created by Zeferino in order to destabilize the common visual perception. This means that the landscape's estrangement finds its double in the erratic way the artist's photographs employ long exposures and artificial lights which lend to the final image an aesthetic of unreal yet realistic contours.
At the end of the process the image represents exactly what escapes the human eye's apprehension. Paradoxically, the photograph does not certify what exists, but documents what escapes us. Image-imagination! The common landscape becomes a set, a potent trace of a now-inapprehensible, stellar and lunar place.
The spinning, directionless earth now serves as a symbol of a universe invented by means of the artist's iconography which has found its poetic essence in the improbable communion of the ruins of man's expansionist raptures and photography's capacity to create worlds parallel to reality. In certain images, these strategies meticulously traced by Zeferino may inspire in us the vision of a lunar landscape or even the fairytale forests of children's or fantasy novels, all the while underlined by the keen presence of man's transformative landscape.
The alchemy inherent in the artist's process concludes by reconnecting the formerly abandoned and uprooted earthly wilds with the cosmos. The stirring sky, the restless stars and the severed earth condemn the human omnipresence, the ages that flow from these photographs. Rodrigo Zeferino's images echo the ancestry perpetuated in the cosmos in the absence of man's actions.
Eder Chiodetto