(En) Trópicos / 2020 Text by Caio Cardial, curator of the exhibition: The days repeat themselves. A few months ago, we experienced an unusual moment. Our space is reduced and time is lengthened. The lack of time has overwhelmed us, now the excess astonishes us. An introspective gesture, a new horizon, where we got closer to our imagination. The perplexity of change, an unprecedented cry asked us: “and now what?” Baptiste uses this dystopian panorama to create another dawn, a new dawn. The construction of these paintings was born from a need to renew the landscape, from a desire for forgotten nature. Go meet her again, relive her. The stimulus for this symbiosis is found in the story of the anthropologist, founder of structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss. In 1935, Lévi-Strauss set out in search of an authentic, pure Brazil, endowed with wild energy, of a singular nature. The author of “Tristes Tropiques” had his expectations of the trip partially fulfilled. His anguish is presented in a fragment of text with the features of prophecy: "In a few hundred years, in this same place, another traveler, as desperate as me, will mourn the disappearance of what I could have seen and which escaped. Victim of a double infirmity, everything I see hurts me, and I constantly reproach myself for not looking hard enough." Baptiste's (en)tropical paintings, like a traveler, take a journey to find a place where the artist finds his vitalism. Maybe these species don't exist, maybe these idyllic landscapes never existed. But the window that Baptiste opens for us lets out air that, today, we can no longer breathe. Baptiste offers us a utopia, he gives us through his gestures a proposal for a paradigm shift, a possible ecology. The word entropy for the Greeks had two meanings: evolution and transformation. For physicists, it is a measure of the disorder of the system. Identify the disorder, transform it.
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