Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira, well know for his organic sculptural installations recently exhibited his ‘Baitogogo’, a matrix of sculptural vegetation which unravels and twists from existing pillars and beams at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The work depicts an architectural grid of columns and support beams that seem to morph into a chaotic tangle of branches or roots. In his installation, Oliveira uses reclaimed wood consisting mainly of Tapume wood retrieved from the streets of São Paulo to create references of his Brazilian culture & identity.
Oliveira draws inspiration from medical textbooks, amongst others, and particularly from studies of physical pathologies such as tumours. Through a formal analogy, these outgrowths evoke the outermost layers of the bark of a common tree. The texture of this wooden installation inevitably calls to mind certain tree essences from Amazonian, humid tropical forests: the rivulets and other nodes constitute uncontrollable networks, in a logic that Man can no longer suppress.
Photogrpahy by André Morin