Dated from 1989, and shown the same year in New York, this work is one of the matrices in the process of construction, reading and signification of the work of Pedro Cabrita Reis, for the concept of melancholy is central to the plastic thought of this artist. The title of the work is the metaphor for an “inner space”, generated and circumscribed by five cypress trees, represented and erected in fiberglass on the same basis, on which also lies an oil lamp, symbolic of the “illumination” of the space and, above all, the presence of “light” that must preside the thought and incessant search, by the human being, of its place in the world. Similar to water (together with earth, air and fire), oil seems to represent one more archetype, also present in works such as - A Casa do Esquecimento
(1990), and it evokes the Mediterranean landscape and culture. Simultaneously, it could be a metaphor for time and the historical dimension of existence, in a permanent game between memory and forgetfulness, light and darkness. In the contrast between the materials that are used and the evocation of a vegetable nature, this sculpture eventually becomes an “image”, simultaneously present and far away, where the chromatic value invokes the historic and etymologic reference of the word melancholy itself which, in Greek, corresponds to the secretion of black bile and the alteration of the mood, due to the influence of Saturn.JCP