As part of Paris Photo 2025, Galerie Salon H presents a compelling solo exhibition featuring the work of Brazilian artist Rodrigo Braga, who uses fire as both medium and metaphor to examine our world in crisis. Born in Manaus in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, Braga employs fire not merely as symbolic imagery but as a critical language that burns, consumes, and transforms. The exhibition centers on his latest series "Pedra Latente" (2023-2025), where stone becomes a hearth of underground embers and serves as an incandescent memory of wounded territories.

The exhibition also features images from Braga's earlier work "Risco de Desassossego" (2004), demonstrating that for over twenty years, the artist has engaged his own body in physical confrontation with natural elements. This long-term practice transforms photography from mere documentation into a field of experience, memory, and healing. Through these works, Braga shows how the medium can become an active participant in exploring the relationship between human bodies and the natural world.

Braga's artistic strength lies in his ability to make each photograph function as a field of tension, creating what can be described as a mythology of the Anthropocene era. In "Pedra Latente," fire operates as a symbolic, energetic, and political force that reveals the delicate balance between destruction and renewal. The series develops a critical mythology for our current geological age, with images that reenact primal dramas within the context of contemporary catastrophe. An egg-grenade hidden in a cave or held in human hands embodies the promise of a world yet to come, already threatened with implosion.

The visual elements in Braga's work carry deep symbolic meaning, particularly his use of burning stones coated with urucum pigment—the color of flesh and memory. Bodies exposed to flames compose episodes of a single narrative about wounded nature seeking to regenerate itself. Beyond their political implications, these photographs strike viewers with their understated beauty and formal intensity. Braga works with light as if it were a physical material, using blacks, reds, and the textures of skin and stone to give each image a silent but powerful density.

The counterpoint series "Risco de Desassossego" illuminates the origins of Braga's research by making burning the foundational act of his artistic practice. These images show a man with closed eyes while matches burn against his forehead or fold burning against his ear. Here, fire is not merely observed but physically experienced. Braga removes himself from the traditional visual field to transform vision into an internal experience, where closed eyelids eliminate the distance between body and flame. The artist becomes simultaneously the support and witness of his own burning process.

This series demonstrates the performative dimension at the heart of Braga's work, where photography becomes an action rather than simple documentation—a passage from body to image, from gesture to lasting trace. His approach engages in dialogue with the critical legacy of Frans Krajcberg, known as "the burned man," while also connecting to broader histories of contemporary photography. In this expanded field, images cease to be mere surfaces and become experiences, traces, and inscriptions that bridge ritual and critique.

Braga's methodology connects him to a lineage of experimental artists who treat imagery as an expanded field existing at the crossroads of performance and installation. In his work, bodily gestures such as burning, imprinting, and drawing transcend traditional photographic frames. Photography becomes active matter rather than passive documentation, creating a space of friction between ritualistic practice and critical examination of contemporary issues.

The physical presentation of the exhibition materializes these conceptual approaches through innovative scenography. Braga covers gallery walls with charcoal and pastel, depicting forests in flames, while photographic prints hang like visual hearths emerging from charred surfaces. This installation approach transforms the exhibition booth into a liminal zone existing between ash and new beginnings, where photography functions simultaneously as both scar and promise of resistance. The immersive environment allows viewers to experience the tension between destruction and regeneration that defines much of the artist's work.