The working class is the first battlefield of modernity. Amidst the noise of machines and the cold glint of metal, life bends to the logic of production. There, time does not belong to those who live, but to those who measure life in profit and wear and tear. The violence of labor is not only physical—it is ontological, dissolving being into doing. It corrodes gesture and silence, reducing the body to a tool and desire to the driving force of a relentless machine.

Capitalism has made matter an extension of flesh, and flesh a commodity. Everything it touches—food, land, affection—becomes exchange value. The promise of progress masks continuous devastation: that of the human transformed into a thing, and of the thing that, because of this, already carries a remnant of humanity. The worker, the inaugural figure of this transmutation, is also the one who comes closest to the truth of the world—because he carries within himself the marks of his own exploitation. But there is something that persists, even under the weight of repetition. A discreet force, perhaps vegetal, that resists total capture. Through the cracks, in the rust, in the fragments that the system rejects, the possibility of re-enchantment still pulses: the gesture of those who collect what is left and make it flourish. It is at this point—where iron meets sap—that work becomes creation again, and the body, once more, human.

Marcos Roberto’s works emerge from this ground, forged in metal, marked by fences and ashes. The artist, a former metalworker, collects remnants of industry and agrarian conflict to make them sprout. Torn gates, worn machetes, wires that echo the touch of hands. “What breaks here is not work, it is the cycle of violence. The plant incorporates steel, reframes the gesture, calls for a new relationship between strength and care,” says Marcos.

His work exposes the persistence of colonial heritage: captivity transfigured into modern servitude, land transformed into business, the body into an instrument. Abolition did not dissolve submission, it only redistributed it in new forms—monocultures, expulsions, inequalities that keep archaic Brazil within modern Brazil. “Sem Terra/Contra-ataque” is an insurgency against modernization without rupture, against progress that isolates the land and silences sowing. Here, the iron that bleeds also germinates, the plant bursts from the steel and embodies the stubbornness of life, the machete breaks into roots and leaves.

In the series “Mercadoria” (Merchandise), Marcos subtly reveals how old structures of domination still traverse bodies and territories, transforming them into goods, products. Tariffs, visas, currencies: everything that measures, controls, and fragments the world circulates between hands, but in an unstable way. “Caution, fragile,” reads boxes that at first glance appear to be made of crumpled cardboard and supposedly precarious, but when touched, we feel the weight of metal, reminding us that even fragility carries the mark of hard and persistent forces. What is produced in Brazil is sold as Brazil. Exploitation changes form, but the logic persists: everything revolves around merchandise, minimum cost, cheap labor, and maximum price—the old economy disguised as something new.

Finally, in “Linhas do Horizonte, páginas de um tempo em branco” (Horizon Lines, Pages of a Blank Time), the artist approaches the field of imagination and possibilities. In oil and industrial enamel on metal, we see a blank notebook page, taped over a landscape. The sheet in front of the horizon is an interval and a promise: a way out through education, now opening up the possibility of something new, of a gaze that relearns how to name the world.

Almost autobiographical, the exhibition “Pra não dizer que não falei das flores” (So as not to say I didn’t talk about flowers) is a silent but powerful pedagogy. In it, Marcos Roberto turns scrap metal into an archive. In each cut and weld, he evokes both sociological lucidity and insurgent tenderness—a way of thinking based on matter, like someone who perceives in craftsmanship a way to rewrite his time.

Paulo Kassab Jr.