Bruno Novelli (1980, Brazil). Lives and works in Sao Paulo.

Brazilian artist Bruno Novelli’s most recent body of work features a range of media, including paintings on canvas, drawings on paper, digital works, and metagraphic maps. Inspired by photographic documentation from long walks during his travels in his native Brazil, particularly the Amazon and the rainforest near the coasts of São Paulo and Santa Catarina, Novelli translated the natural images he saw and experienced into the digitized, geometric forms seen in the colorful paintings and drawings in this recent series. Through these various works, Novelli uses the forest to articulate a chain of organic relationships, similar to those that also exist in an urban environment.

The layers in the paintings and digital images speak to the layers of time that connect the present with past memories, suggesting both the idea of continuity and the uniqueness of each moment. Throughout each work, the artist’s process operates as a recitation of visual poetry, while celebrating the materiality of painting. A series of metagraphic maps also illustrate Novelli’s artistic process as an exploration of a visual verbal language, functioning as diagrams through the artist’s mind during the act of creation. These design-based diagrams address the artist’s interdisciplinary exploration of these themes of identity and interconnected relationships. Several new digital works are based on animated gifs, bringing together different images from photo registers from the artist’s explorations of the rainforest and abstract and geometric shapes.

Novelli is graduated in Graphic Design at ESPM in Sao Paulo and studied sculpture at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and Drawing at the Atelier Livre da Prefeitura de Porto Alegre in Brazil. Novelli is a founder of the Universidade Autoindicada por Entidades Livres, which was created to articulate interdisciplinary artistic research. He is also co-founder of Metagrafismo (Metagraphism), an experimental collective exploring the graphic potential of metalinguistics. Novelli’s work has been exhibited in his native Brazil, as well as internationally in England, Denmark, Spain, Japan and the United States. Most recently he has participated in exhibitions at Fundacion OSDE (Buenos Aires), Centro Nacional de Las Artes (CENART - Mexico) and at the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS) in São Paulo.

Ruth Bruno, Denver, CO. 2014.