Hortus

By Marcelo Guimaraes Lima

Piece description from the artist

Hortus, is part of a series called Hortus Absconditus (Hidden Garden), The garden is the ordering of nature by culture. Alois Riegl defined art as a disputation of man with nature. The form giving processes of nature constituted for the Austrian art historian both a model and a challenge to art. To Riegl, such a relationship, at the same time adaptive and competitive , between the work of art and nature, implied no simple “naturalism”, the reproduction of natural appearances, but demanded always a distillation and recreation of our perceptual actions and our productive formal capacities in contact with and in contrast to the natural world of forms. The “will to form” proper to art, expresses spiritual freedom within material conditions and therefore it states a kind of differential “equality” between the powers of nature and that of our own creative capacities.