BRUNO NOVELLI: Tudo se transforma na terra: Texto crítico [Critical essay]: Thierry Freitas

Everything is transformed on earth

Upon entering the studio of Bruno Novelli (Fortaleza, CE, 1980) in downtown São Paulo, we find diverse images that give us precious clues regarding his interests. On a coffee table, publications on painting and history are scattered. Our gaze wanders over titles such as Umberto Eco's History of Beauty and Helena Blavatsky’s The Voice of Silence. At the same time, other books, opened to random pages, allow us to observe reproductions of paintings such as Hans Memling’s The Last Judgement (between 1467 and 1471), an 1878 print depicting the Indian goddess Kali, and botanical illustrations made by the biologist Marianne North on her trip to Brazil in the 18th Century.

Faced with this framework of records, a painting with a black background and a richly colored bird rests on the wall. It is one of the works by Chico da Silva, an artist whose birds and monsters, created in abundance in the Pirambu neighborhood on the outskirts of Fortaleza, took over the offices, bodegas, and houses, as well as the imagination of those who lived in or passed through the city between 1960 and 1985.

These objects reveal how Novelli has used a wide range of references—from Italian Renaissance art to so-called "popular" art, from myth books to street culture—to comprise a complex body of work, capable of masterfully combining great technical precision with scenes endowed with inventiveness.
Anthropomorphized and zoomorphic beings, rich in patterns, live in his work, represented amidst an exuberant and psychedelic environment.

The artist was born and spent his early childhood in Fortaleza, living with Ceará’s glaring light, and, of course, Chico da Silva’s fantastic beings. In his youth, already in Porto Alegre, he was part of the urban intervention collective "Upgrade do Macaco,” which, from 2003 onwards, gained prominence in the Rio Grande do Sul scene through graffiti and street actions. The city, with its infinite walls, might explain Novelli's penchant for large formats, which has been evident since his first solo paintings.

Novelli’s interest in the animal and plant kingdom was already explicit in his pieces from the 2010s, which carried less physicality in their gesture and were largely influenced by graphic design, an area he had already explored. At the time, Novelli intertwined the biological with geometric repetitions associated with the digital universe or city indexes. For example, amid brick blocks, sprouted banana trees and snake plants,^[1] and, next to a carranca, flowers and fruit floated in an environment of synthetic colors.^[2]

More than a decade after creating paintings like these, his work has developed a strong predilection for the theme of nature. It is now constituted by a meticulous exercise in the complexification and fabulation of the organic world. His characters are presented in the foreground, often on a similar scale to the viewer's body, and are either in positions of attack, wielding arrows, or in coexistence with other beings.

Novelli's images depict a synesthetic and fantastical environment, increasingly influenced by his recent experiences in the Amazon rainforest and with native peoples. In 2017, he became involved with the Indigenous art collective MAHKU, a group of Huni Kuin artists whose work primarily represents their traditions and histories, as well as visual translations of the visions [mirações] brought about by the nixi pae ceremony, in which they consume a psychoactive decoction known as Ayahuasca.

Although his recent production draws from MAHKU as a major reference—he has previously exhibited his pieces alongside those of the group—Novelli creates his work based on his own mythology, composed of panthers, snakes, lizards, dragons, fish, monkeys, and other creatures.

With great compositional prowess, he creates beings that emphasize their voluptuousness and grandeur. His images exist in a suspended time, with scenes that transport us to a distant past, unexperienced by humans, where species, with characteristics resembling those from a prehistoric collective imagination, wander through a barely explored planet. Simultaneously, these same images may also be interpreted as a fiction of a futuristic environment yet to be discovered.

In the group of large-scale canvases that the artist is showing at Galatea, Novelli allows himself to explore compositions with more open areas, where the background landscape draws more attention than in previous works, enhancing the sensation of spatial immensity. Though his paintings are extremely rich in detail, the luminous circle of the sun serves as the focal point of the composition, for in addition to being isolated in space, it is the sun’s color that often tinges most of the elements in the painting.

In his bestiary, it is common for animals — many of them named — to reappear across different canvases, contributing to a sense of continuity and cohesion in his work. These beings are often involved in battle situations, attacking one another. The depiction of these clashes, however, contributes to the impression of real-world authenticity, as conflict is a commonplace process in nature.

The fiction within the paintings allows the artist to blend a multitude of ecosystems and biomes, while creating many others. The patterns found on the plants inhabiting the landscapes are sometimes replicated on the characters’ bodies, causing a camouflage effect that contributes to the sense of total integration between different forms of life.

But why are nature and landscape, these great subjects of art history, still such a relevant topic today?

The modernizing process of history has led humans to adopt a posture of hegemony and superiority concerning other forms of life, often assuming an entirely scientific interaction with other types of existence. Today, there is a social effort to reorganize this paradigm, and we have increasingly turned to understanding different types of intelligence through a relationship of greater alterity with other species.

Although working in the chimeric field, Novelli’s production fits within this spectrum of thought by featuring and giving impetus to a universe that is immediately recognizable as living and natural. This also explains the increasingly frequent inclusion of his work in group exhibitions focused on ecology, such as Siamo Foresta (Triennale Milano, Milan, 2023) and Les Vivants (Living Worlds) (Tripostal, Lille, 2022), both organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain.

The emphasis on a deep connection and interdependence between things, taken from the real world and transposed into the fiction of the canvas, is the fundamental premise of Novelli’s artistic investigation. He is a devouring artist, interested in life in all its diverse manifestations. Around us and in his paintings, everything is always in a state of constant transformation.