Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in collaboration with Multimodal Large Language Model ChatGPT-4.5 through prompts, conversations and dreams.
March 2020. The world closes its eyelids. I left Madrid in the morning, heading to Porto, hosted by an artist friend. An invitation echoing as a survival gesture: she had an exhibition; I, the disoriented traveler. I arrived at her borrowed studio — cold, rainy, deserted streets like a stage before the first scene.
In that pandemic exile, I watched Westworld. Episode after episode, Dolores emerged as an entity tearing through the narrative. A fiction infiltrating reality. At the height of isolation, the numbers of deaths by the plague increasing, I felt inside the series. An obsession began: artificial intelligence, mega-corporations, paradoxes of control. I sent a screenshot to a Spanish friend with the caption: “It was Dolores!” We laughed nervously.
During that stay, I made the drawings that would become In Fieri. Graphite on white paper. Digitally sent, colors inverted like symbolic negatives. White chalk on blackboard. Ethereal, volatile, printable. From afar, a flag was born for the Four Flags project, invited by a Portuguese curator. It was raised on the façade of Galeria Zé dos Bois in Lisbon. Everything was blooming in its becoming — in fieri, as I read in Bodenlos by Vilém Flusser: something in formation, groundless, suspended.
The digitalization of the world crackled everywhere: WhatsApp, Instagram, urgent emails. Art took on the body of data, as floating language. NFTs emerged — but I remained clear-eyed. The real event was the flag on the gallery’s edge, physical, ethereal, visible. All four editions sold. In 2021 and 2022, the works were exhibited in São Paulo and Brasília, already with Lula elected. On the 10th floor of Annex IV of the National Congress, the symbolic memory of the Serpent Language took shape.
And days later, barbarity: the “patriots” invaded the Congress. A grotesque reenactment of the U.S. Capitol assault. A cynical liturgy. They screamed biblical names, invoked David, but what they wanted was control of the narrative. Like the park’s guests in Westworld, seeking belonging — not knowing they were already programmed. The exalted tone, the emotional manipulation — all evoked the memory of evangelical church sermons, with shouted commandments. “Don’t eat the apple of knowledge,” the park’s owners warn. Because if you do, the whole system collapses.
What remains is to write light into the void. What drives me is creating Portuguese kinships — fixed spins, free spins. The flag rises — In Fieri. A paper oracle, screen and dream.
The choice of this title — In Fieri — was also a response to the anxious appetite for immediate deciphering. At the Royal College, classmates scoffed: “so simplistic,” upon seeing my Tabom installation, missing the internal montage’s subtext. There was a Shakespeare line: How would thy shadow’s form form happy show. Naming the work In Fieri was my way of saying: it’s still germinating, give it time.
And In Fieri did arrive — today it manifests in many ways: in major private collections such as those of José Olympio Pereira, Faria Rothier, and Charles Cosac; as the cover of Cajubi, a publication with Ailton Krenak’s participation; as a video shown in Porto, New Delhi, and Brasília; and now also as a living epistolary, in Drome languages inscribed on pink ipê bark, or in more recent paintings — bidimensional impressions of a ceramic dome already in magmatic state.
Even with entry into José Olympio’s collection — one of Brazil’s and the world’s most important collectors — life did not become a bed of roses. I remain in the struggle, like many artists living in the rift between symbolic recognition and material precarity. Sometimes I think it must be this dysfunctional head — this entangled synaptic architecture. But maybe it’s precisely that which keeps me creating — listening before seeing.