Christus Amazonicus - April: Earth Month
Silvio Moscoso
This piece, conceived as a work of protest, begins with a deliberate act: it borrows the most symbolically powerful image in Western history—Christ crucified—and reconfigures it not as a redeemer, but as yet another victim of ecological collapse. The white rose, the visual axis of the work, replaces the face of the messiah. There is no merciful gaze, no human suffering—only flora, transformed into martyrdom, into an icon of an era where sacrifice no longer atones for guilt, but makes it undeniable.
The choice of a white rose is far from innocent: it is innocence itself, mutilated. It stands in stark contrast to the river, dyed red—not merely with blood, but with spillage, oil, extraction, systematic abuse. The wounded heart is not a symbol of religious passion, but the planet’s circulatory system—broken, violated, profaned.
The felled trees whose shadows cast the shape of crosses are not just a stroke of compositional brilliance; they are visual testimony to the vegetal genocide we normalize every day. At the tip of the wooden cross, the raw cut forms a crude but unmistakable crown of thorns, reminding us that even the sacred symbols have been absorbed and corrupted by ecological collapse.
The severed foot and hand, wrapped in bark-like texture, speak of an expanded crucifixion: the jungle and the body are one, and both are being dismembered. A single feather-covered bone—a subtle but devastating detail—points directly to Indigenous peoples, those who not only inhabited the land, but guarded it as an extension of themselves, until modern man arrived to teach them how to disappear.
A nearby bird’s nest, where once the promise of new life resided, now cradles eggs splattered with what appears to be oil—a brutal image of contamination reaching even the most delicate origins.
Moscoso doesn’t resort to vague metaphors in an attempt to gently persuade the viewer’s conscience. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Christus Amazonicus is not what it shows—but what it suggests: indifference. There are no screams in the scene. No resistance. Only martyrdom accepted.
Moscoso does not paint hope. He merely hints at it.
A buried hand, from whose fingers light emanates, becomes the last breath of what once was balance.
There, a hummingbird—persistent, inexplicably vital—drinks unaware that it drinks from ruins.
And this is perhaps the most sublime detail of the piece:
The hummingbird still drinks from the light in the hands of Mother Nature, in the midst of this blood-soaked field.
Not to save the crucified flower.
Not to save us.
Certainly not to awaken guilt in our conscience and dictate the “right” moral codes.
It is designed this way because the artist knows this is what its nature is:
To persist, inexplicably, in the memory of all that was once sacred.
