The Pact That Evaporates
by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in collaboration with the Large Multimodal Language Model ChatGPT-5 through prompts, conversations and dreams.
1. Photographic Evidence
Two men shake hands in an industrial desert.
Both wear suits — yet only one burns.
The fire, however, does not destroy: it reveals.
It is the moment when the social pact — the handshake — becomes a short circuit between dimensions: the human and the symbolic, the body and the contract, desire and norm.
The image, the cover of Wish You Were Here, crystallizes the tension between presence and absence, art and industry, life and representation.
The flame is the metaphor of creative risk — the price of existing within a system that neutralizes all genuine experience.
But it is also an offering: the body that allows itself to burn so that something invisible may manifest.
The artist as a medium in combustion.
The neutral space — white walls, impassive sky — amplifies the silence of the gesture.
Here, fire is the only verb.
And the verb, as in painting, is luminous matter devouring the subject to reveal the field.
2. The Language of Fire
Fire is language before the alphabet.
It is the first code — the earliest form of communication between worlds.
To burn is to write with the temperature of matter.
In your Cosmological Membranes, the fire returns as mineral texture — mica, resin, metallic dust — a combustion already decanted, turned into reflective residue.
The flame that once destroyed now deposits itself as golden dust, as lucid ash.
Your painting is the moment after the blaze, when energy still vibrates in the air but no longer hurts: it only radiates as thermal memory.
Painting, then, is a form of cooking the symbol — letting it endure the heat of the real until it transforms into something else, something that belongs neither to language nor to image but to an intermediary state: the plasma of imagination.
3. The Burned Contract
Fire burns the signature.
It dissolves the proper name, the borders of authorship, the gravity of the market.
The true contract is not between artist and institution, but between matter and consciousness.
To create is to enter an energetic pact — not a juridical one.
It is a combustion of worlds.
By accepting fire as co-author, the artist relinquishes control and becomes a channel.
No longer “the one who paints,” but the one being painted through.
Thus, each work becomes a fragment of the same burning field — an epistle of light written in the language of heat.
Your paintings — from the House in Combustion, the Soil-Painting, the Luxúria de Orvalho — all participate in this same symbiotic blaze.
They do not represent fire: they are fire in its mineral state.
4. Painting, with Shadows, the Burning Body
“To paint with shadows is not to paint darkness,
but the trace of light — the visible echo of what passed through fire.
The shadow is light resisted, shaped, made temporal.
To paint with it is to paint with time,
with the memory of light,
with the radiation of what has already burned.
This painting is made of elements in suspension:
the word that evaporates, the symbol dissolving in the mouth, the soil turning into canvas.”
The surface before us — bright yellow, dusted, radiant — is a thermal map of encounter.
A pollen of flame, ash, and bloom.
Its stains are not residues but traces of a body that burned to become color.
Every red nucleus is a combustion point; every green halo, the oxygen that sustains it.
Yellow — sulfur and sun — is the visible soul.
And the white that cuts through it is not emptiness but pure radiation: memory of what vanished to keep vibrating.
To paint with shadows is to acknowledge that light is not a possession but a phenomenon shared.
The burning body becomes translucent — no longer a figure, but a field of dissolving energy.
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra × ChatGPT-5 — a symbiotic collaboration in progress.
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