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Galeria Nara Roesler | São Paulo presents No Meio (In the Middle), a solo show featuring works created by Bruno Dunley between 2015 and 2018, alongside text by Tadeu Chiarelli. The critic points out that artists react in different ways to the ocean of images that reaches everyone. “There are those who gladly drown in the murky waters of the internet, hunting for icons that can be processed into ‘works,’ and those who, like Dunley, although immersed in those same and driven to search them for food for their productions, resist drowning in the undercurrents of the innocuous which rule the depths of said ocean.”

Chiarelli discusses the show’s eponymous painting, No meio (2016), which can be understood as an emblem for artists who resist the naturalization of this imagistic overload. “presents itself as a mirror which apparently reflects nothing, carrying the inscription “no meio” (written, not reflected).”

The curator points out that the paintings Dunley has been putting out in recent years are replete with mirrors of this kind, which do not reflect the world, but mark a precise spot at the center of many of his creations. “By making these artworks, situated as they are between the affirmation of pictorial artmaking and the presence of signs from that ocean of images that has been definitively made into our new first nature, Dunley seems to find, in these blind mirrors he makes, the last fortress, or the last lighthouse to guide him, preventing him from submerging for good.”

Exhibition Views

vista da exposição -- bruno dunley: no meio -- galeria nara roesler | são paulo, 2018

Press

  • a pintura reinventada Download

    a pintura reinventada

    antonio gonçalves filho, o estado de s. paulo 23.6.2018
  • pintura é estrela em mostras nos jardins Download

    pintura é estrela em mostras nos jardins

    folha de s.paulo - guia da folha 22.6.2018

Critical Essays

  • regarding bruno dunley's mirror's or seeking the lighthouse of the drowned

    tadeu chiarelli
    I’d like to start off this text with a fact: 34-year-old Bruno Dunley’s career as a professional painter goes back eleven years (his first solo show happened in 2007). Thus, one could argue that as he came up as an artist, the internet and its devices were already part of most people’s lives, broadening and completely changing our perception of art and reality[1] . This new scenario exponentially heightens the presence of second-generation images in our daily lives, a condition which a considerable part of global society had already been experiencing since at least the end of World War II. Throughout the 1980s, this scenario would see its first heyday, especially in art production. In that decade – that is, some 30 years ago –, some artists and critics emphasized a phenomenon which characterized much of the art of then: the “return to the museum.” They argued that art from that decade (better known as the “painting revival” years) found itself in a peculiar situation: many artists were...