A country is composed of its landscapes. Mollica’s work over the last ten years has been about just this.
It started with his fascination with landscapist Antônio Parreiras’s research into the quality of light in Rio de Janeiro (1884 to 1934). Consequently, Mollica’s own concept of landscape explodes in the paintings of the great mountains of Rio of 1980/90 – those that you can see on the television at the far end of Conte’s cave/chapel. These great rocks continue there to remind us of our non-History.
It was in contact with this non-History that the key moments in our national construction were hatched. There was never a real country here, just a series of outbreaks that always point outwards, away from what we understand by country and History; something earthly that joins together many peoples (and all time) in a carnivalesque and achronological way. It was like that with romantic indigenousness after Independence and with our positivist republicans, followers of Comte. In France nobody kept alive Comte’s final delirium by creating a religion. Outside this chapel in Paris the Positivist Church only found room in Mexico and Brazil. That is because the imaginary narrative which creates gods and peoples continues alive and well among the Mexicans and us
In the 20’s, in another outbreak of “forming the nation”, we repeated this multiple voice, ownerless and displaced, in our anthropophagous modernism of blacks and Indians. It was in this decade, together with the first industrial cycle and the foundation of the Brazilian Communist Party, that middle-class intellectuals, who followed the same programme as the modernists, created Umbanda; afro, nativist, cannibal aesthetic - no prejudice - a kind of echo of the republican madness of Comte. A church for a people without sin. Expression of our demented happiness and not of our misery. We invented gods. The latter is a “truck driver”. Umbanda means “passage” (or “pasture”).
This is the tale with which Mollica wants to rattle and shock the house of Auguste Comte; now, as a fine and disparate tribute, House of Brazil.
Mauro Sá Rego Costa
…Imagine a kaleidoscopic typhoon sucked up the infinite landscapes of Rio de Janeiro in the blue morning with neon signs still switched on in order to blow them back inside-out on to a mirror of its myths. One could see the trail of invisible characters. On the skin drum a guttural body penetrated the grotto covered by the veil of water Omolu-Oxum of Kaiapó-Tamôio – a cure without asepsis is more voracious and irreverently applauds the globalization of information where its feet do not feel the stones the bed of hot coals. The bed of Brazil boiling the synthesis of all its past and future. The ritual of someone unknown at some street corner. Living Nature: a hidden sun in between new academies of smoked glass.
Xico Chaves
April 1997
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