Nara Roesler New York is pleased to announce “Clouds”, a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Bruno Dunley.
As a central protagonist of the young generation of painters in Brazil, the artist presents here his second solo exhibition in the city, showcasing a set of paintings and works on paper developed over the last two years.
Dunley’s current production continues to explore the constitutive tensions of painting, namely between image and structural thickness, matter and scheme, always determined by an emphatic use of color. Initiated during the pandemic, and thus produced in a more isolated environment, Clouds includes a series of paintings that seem to have internalized the artist’s surroundings at the time, suggesting disoriented and labyrinthine fields, and emphasizing a dreamlike and subjective tone where color manifests in its excess, through indeterminate spaces.
Since 2020, the artist has deepened his experimentation with color, notably driven by his venture with the brand Joules & Joules, which he founded alongside artist Rafael Carneiro. With imports paralyzed, the growing business began during Covid-19 as a result of the scarcity of high-quality oil paints and offers the first high-quality and affordable national product for artists across the country. The venture launched the artist into a meticulous and highly experimental relationship with pigments, which is reflected in Dunley’s recent production. Motivated by a quest for luminosity in the use of oil itself, he proceeds through layers of paint, left to cover or scraped, unfolding a material narrative for his paintings.
Dunley’s works on paper are produced with chalk and charcoal, proposing a more succinct formal and chromatic repertoire. Many of the works on paper included in the exhibition engage with the idea of the cloud, with the artist repeatedly drawing its form, not as a means to achieve compositional rigor, but as a way to let himself be guided by the investigative possibilities of the sketch as a structural foundation for his paintings.
In Cloud, the form is explored as an abstract occurrence rather than a figure. Works like Yellow Cloud, The cloud, and The city capture its form on the edge of the formless, presenting a presence that seems to float within uncertainty. Clouds have always been boundary figures against the backdrop of geometry and perspective, fragments of reality that challenge measurement and graphic control, and, as in Dunley’s recent work, potentially symbolic forms for abstraction, conveying lightness and playful dreaminess.
The work of Bruno Dunley, born in 1984 in Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro, questions the specificity of painting, particularly in relation to representation and materiality. His paintings start from carefully constructed compositions, which he gradually begins to correct, alter, and cover, often revealing the gaps in the apparent continuity of perception. Bruno Dunley is part of a new generation of Brazilian painters called the 200e8 group. The collective, based in São Paulo, was founded with a common interest in painting, to allow its eight members to develop a critical approach to painting in the contemporary art scene. Dunley’s work begins with found images and an analysis of the nature of painting, where language codes such as gesture, plane, surface, and representation are understood as an alphabet. Recently, his practice has shifted to gestural abstraction while maintaining his interest in representation.