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About
Otávio Motta is a Brazilian artist and designer whose practice investigates matter as a living field.
Working across sculpture, sculptural design, and material research, Motta explores the moment in which form ceases to be merely functional or inert and becomes presence. Wood, brass, stone, steel, glass, and light are approached not simply as materials, but as active fields where density, friction, silence, and suspension reveal invisible forces.
His research unfolds through four movements — Transcendence, The Nothing Between, Immanence of the Interval, and Transfiguration of Matter — forming a continuous investigation into the threshold where the visible meets the submerged, where function opens into presence, and where matter becomes sensitive.
Motta’s sculptural design does not depart from his artistic practice; it expands it. His functional works are conceived as presences in space — objects, lighting works, furniture pieces, and architectural bodies shaped by the same material tension and spiritual density found in his sculpture.
Motta lives and works in Brazil.
Artist Statement
My research begins with matter understood as a living presence.
Wood, brass, stone, steel, glass, light, weight, and density become means to investigate a space that is not only physical, but also spiritual — an interval where energy and silence confront each other.
I work from tension: between gesture and suspension, opacity and shine, the raw and the sacred, function and presence. It is in this friction that matter seems to gain a voice — an internal vibration that pulses, breathes, and reveals what cannot be seen.
Each work emerges from this liminal territory: a place where form becomes body, emptiness becomes active, and the invisible seems to cross the surface of the world.
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