Exhibition "Bruno Novelli: everything is transformed on earth"

A Galatea opens, on October 3rd, the unprecedented exhibition Bruno Novelli: Everything changes on earth, the largest solo show ever presented by the artist. With a critical text written by the curator Thierry Freitas, the exhibition is an invitation to Novelli's tropical and fantastic universe, bringing together 10 large-format paintings created especially for the occasion.

With a career spanning almost two decades, the artist presents canvases populated by fantasy beings created in dense compositions, colors and graphics. Among the works on display is the largest painting Novelli has ever produced: Garden of Daimons (2024), measuring 2,70 meters high by 4 meters wide.

Strongly inspired by the exuberance of the Amazon world and in long-standing dialogue with the indigenous Huni Kuin artists of the MAKHU collective, Novelli brings compositions rich in color and complex patterns to his paintings, which feature fantastic animals and dreamlike visions of nature. He also explores the tension between the European view of the tropical landscape and the clash between nature and its domination by man. Another important influence for Novelli is the painter of indigenous descent Chico da Silva (Alto Tejo, 1910 – 1985, Fortaleza), from whom he absorbed the fantastic imagery during his early childhood in Fortaleza, where the artist's legacy is significant.

Bruno Novelli manages to mobilize in his work a pulsating image of nature, or rather, of living worlds, to paraphrase the title of the exhibition organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in which he participated: Les vivants (Living Worlds), held in 2022 at the Tripostal, in Lille, France. In 2023, Novelli participated in another important exhibition organized by the Fondation Cartier, this time at the Triennale de Milano, in Milan, Italy, under the title Siamo Foresta.

Regarding his creative process, Novelli comments: “My painting starts from a mental state of fascination, of mystery. From a universal imaginary background related to what is tropical, what is mystical, what is paradisiacal, brutal, I come across diverse images, from a stone monument from Mesopotamia to an Amazonian myth or the imagery of a medieval bestiary. All of this forms a database from which I extract these references and develop a personal synthesis, which I then bring to the painting.”

For curator Thierry Freitas, who wrote the critical text, “Novelli’s images result in figurations of a synesthetic and fantastic environment, increasingly influenced by the artist’s recent experiences in the Amazon rainforest and with indigenous peoples. Since 2017, he has been close to the indigenous art collective MAHKU, a group of Huni Kuin artists, whose paintings consist mainly of representations of the traditions and stories of this people, as well as visual translations of the visions provoked by the nixi pae ceremony, with the use of the psychedelic tea known as ayahuasca.”

Service
Exhibition | Bruno Novelli: Everything changes on earth
From October 03rd to November 01st
Monday to Thursday from 10am to 19pm, Friday from 10am to 18pm, Saturday from 11am to 17pm