Marcelo Moscheta maps the fragile intersection of memory, landscape, and materiality, charting a practice that is as much about presence as it is about absence. Born in Brazil and now based in Portugal, Moscheta’s work is an excavation of land, of time, and of the intangible forces that shape both. His early years, spent in a city devoid of art institutions, fueled an instinct to search, to uncover connections where none seemed to exist. His first works traced the lineage of a grandfather he never met, scouring through materials from his familial archive to create etching fragments of the past into tangible form. This impulse to locate oneself within the vastness of history and geography continues to drive his work today.

A practice rooted in materiality, he engages a diverse array of mediums from graphite to concrete, PVC, ceramics, and found natural elements. Moscheta engages in a material dialogue with the landscape, evoking both its solidity and ephemerality. Dissolving into liminal spaces, within his work we find something both hyperreal and intangible. Unfixed and vulnerable to touch, he mirrors the instability of memory and place. In other artworks, he repurposes the earth itself, mud from environmental disasters, shaped into ceramic relics that preserve destruction as artifacts, forcing us to confront the tension between what we discard and what endures.

Entranced by texture and shape, the materiality of his work dictates its execution. The haptic over the optic motivations become apparent as his work often appears in more monochromatic palettes. Color is merely a vehicle for propelling the nature of his subject, the metaphors lying within each material, and the true essence of the place within each piece. Much like the British artists Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, the use of earthly pigments heightens the conversation of disconnection and dislocation.

Moscheta views the intersections of art, place, and identity not only from an artistic perspective, but a critical one. Channeling art historians like Lucy Lippard and anthropologists like Bruce Chatwin, his work reorients our landscape as both a physical and mental place for enlightenment. In a reinvention of minimalist interpretations of art combined with the grandeur of geological intervention witnessed by influential Brazilian artists such as Nelson Felix and Anna Bella Geiger, Moscheta’s sculptural installations force new perspectives through an aura of ephemerality and immersion.

In creating these works that reflect on the relationship of the individual to the world, their past, and themselves, Moscheta’s practice has evolved into an isolating one. His residency experiences have been pivotal, transforming his solitary studio practice into a site of exchange, where the process of creation becomes performative and communal. From this urban environment emerged a culture of exchange that added a condensed and deepened self-perception of his work that will continue to expand his poetic topology of impermanence, where the landscape becomes both a mirror and a measure of the self.