Um Poço Fitando o Céu ( A Well Staring at the Sky ), 2022

 

Um Poço Fitando o Céu extends the concerns first articulated in The Love of a Shade and the Jealousy of an Aura, but now on a larger scale and in direct dialogue with the open environment. Resting on a copper base encircled by a steel rim, the shift in material vocabulary recalibrates the work’s temporal dimension. Copper’s gradual oxidation—developing into green hues—unfolds more slowly than iron’s corrosion, evoking processes of sedimentation, atmosphere, and mineral transformation. The sculpture does not resist this transformation but embraces it: its surface becomes a register of exposure, bearing the traces of rain, sun, humidity, and temperature shifts. The changing patina inscribes the passing of days and seasons onto the work itself, binding its existence to the same temporal cycles that shape the natural world. In this way, material change is not incidental but constitutive: the sculpture incorporates its own weathering as part of its life cycle, rendering time a medium as much as matter.

​​

The piece also reflects and responds to its immediate site—an enclosed patio built upon a sedimentary rock formation, where geological time is inscribed in the layers beneath. Here, the work becomes part of a dialogue not only with sky and atmosphere but with the strata that anchor it. From this contained space, the faint but persistent sound of a nearby waterfall permeates the air. Though hidden from view, its presence is registered through sound, shaping the experience of the sculpture. The invisible flow resonates with the well-like form, reinforcing the interplay between what is seen and what is only sensed.

​

The title, drawn from Fernando Pessoa’s Litany, situates the work within a philosophical inquiry into the human condition: “We never know self-realization. We are two abysses—a well staring at the sky.” Pessoa’s formulation articulates a dialectic between grounding and immensity, enclosure and expansion. The sculpture embodies this tension both symbolically and materially, at once rooted in the earth and oriented upward toward immeasurable space.

​

As a continuation, Um Poço Fitando o Céu amplifies its predecessor’s exploration of materiality, time, and transcendence. Its slow metamorphosis through oxidation enacts temporal duration, while its outdoor presence subjects it to the elemental forces that both erode and renew. By uniting surface restraint with underlying intricacy, and by resonating with the geology and acoustics of its setting, the sculpture becomes a site of reflection on the relationship between finitude and the infinite—situating the human condition within the oscillation between permanence and change, the visible and the concealed.