The artistic practice of Pedro Matsuo (Porto Alegre, 1996) takes shape as a territory of survival, reaction, and ongoing search for meaning. In his poetics, trauma and displacement do not appear as paralysis but as founding forces: the image of a cocoon continually struck by napalm that, far from breaking apart, hardens its structure with every impact. Born in Rio Grande do Sul, the artist underwent a decisive turning point in 2014, when a critical health event left him in a coma. Immersed in profound darkness, beset by visions poised at the border between life and finitude, the search for a point of light became a vital urgency. Out of that rebirth, light ceased to be a contemplative abstraction and took hold in his work as a physical vector of orientation, healing, and existential imperative.

This drive to grasp life in its many dimensions is reflected in a refusal of any single language. Moving between painting, sculpture, installation, and photography, Matsuo turns creative restlessness into a working method. To organize the flow of the studio and channel psychic chaos, the artist distributes his output across more than ten heteronyms, among them Báumk Brofan, Peter Didegrim, Ratsuo, and Fernando Penmedialb. Each persona operates with its own stylistic autonomy and obsessions, functioning as a device for channeling states of mind that range from the chaotic, visceral gesture of turbulent moments to the precision of line in periods of inner stabilization.

His investigation of materials reflects a constant tension between the transient and the permanent. Working from the fragility of paper to the structural rigidity of metal, Matsuo builds a bridge between the archaic and the contemporary. His research illuminates the contrast between the ancestral use of light, harking back to primordial fire and the sun's path through space, and the modern technological mediation of digital projection and photoluminescent paint. This friction stood at the center of the installation he presented at the 13th Mercosul Biennial, at the Paço Municipal in Porto Alegre, where visitors moved through an immersive labyrinth guided by light emanating from the works themselves, experiencing the passage from darkness into clarity.

More recently, the artist has turned his critical eye toward contemporary addictions and the invisible mechanisms of social control. Matsuo examines how virtual architectures, networks, and media incorporate logics of persuasion analogous to slot machines, using color, sound, and quick hits of dopamine to induce dependency and systemic anxiety. Recognizing in his own daily life an addiction to digital media and a loss of autonomy before technological devices, the artist uses studio practice as a laboratory for slowing down and understanding these dynamics of domination.

This search for negotiation takes shape in the development of pendulum sculptures and mobiles. Matter suspended in air embodies the fragility of control: structures that hover in apparent stillness yet respond to the slightest shift in the surrounding air to find their axis again. In the work *O Equilíbrio Digitanonológico*, a book and a tablet face each other at opposite ends of a steel bar, giving material form to the tension between historical physical media and the speed of virtual mediation. Through this continuous exercise in force, weight, and counterweight, Pedro Matsuo turns vulnerability into a three-dimensional language, asserting art as the space where chaos finds the possibility of rebalancing itself.

In this sense, the cocoon that opens this reflection finds, by the end, its sculptural equivalent. If the initial metaphor describes an organism that grows stronger with every impact, Matsuo's mobiles and pendulum structures give that same principle physical form: pieces that seek not the stability of a fixed monument but the resilience of a system in constant adjustment. It is in this shift, from trauma as origin to balance as method, that Pedro Matsuo's work moves away from biographical narrative and toward a proposition about contemporary sculpture: to remain standing, today, is not synonymous with stillness, but with a constant capacity to recalibrate against the force of one's surroundings, whether that force is sunlight, the weight of metal, or the speed of the digital world.