How do we represent nature? The question calls for a critical reassessment of the Western history of vision. With the invention of perspective during the Renaissance, painting established a visual regime centered on the human subject: the world became organized around a stable viewpoint, structured by depth and ordered according to harmonious rules. Natural elements -trees, plants, rivers, mountains- were distributed within a rational and anthropocentric framework. As Anne Cauquelin(1) has shown, landscape does not coincide with nature itself; it is a cultural construction. The frame does not merely delimit an image, it produces a way of seeing and therefore a way of symbolically inhabiting space.
Fernanda Galvão’s painting works against this tradition. It offers neither a stabilized horizon nor a dominant point of view, neither contemplative distance nor consoling refuge. Forms overflow, contaminate one another, and proliferate, generating spaces without origin or end. What emerges is no longer a nature designed to be seen, but an autonomous milieu, indifferent to our presence.
In the exhibition presented at Barbara Thumm Gallery, this inquiry reaches a new threshold by displacing painting into space. A serpentine structure made of three panels, scaled to the body and covered in linen, introduces a sinuous line that physically engages the viewer and alters their trajectory. Painting becomes volume, situation, presence. The authority of the gaze dissolves: one can no longer determine whether one stands above a landscape, inside a body, or before a cosmic cartography. Chromatic seduction contrasts with the density of the surfaces and the complexity of textures, demanding sustained attention. Nothing appears as a graspable whole; the experience unfolds through fragments, shifts in proximity, and repeated repositionings.
The question of the boundary becomes central. Forms seem to grow beyond their edges, as though the canvas were no longer sufficient to contain their organic expansion. Layers of oil, charcoal, and pastel accumulate within a stratified temporality, turning painting into a living process in which each stratum retains the memory of the previous ones.
The work thus generates less an image to contemplate than an environment to inhabit, planets endowed with their own climates and temporalities. An initial layer of highly diluted oil with solvent lays down vast aqueous fields that establish the atmospheric tonality of the surface. Organic masses and mineral strata appear to follow internal logics of gravity and temperature. Much like Nicolas Floc’h(2) describes the color of water as revealing invisible biological or geological phenomena, Fernanda Galvão’s palettes like cold blues, thermal reds, dermal pinks, read as sensitive climate records of a world in transformation. Concave forms retain coolness while convex surfaces radiate heat, a serpent would follow such thermal gradients, its body adjusting to the surrounding environment. Like all ectothermic species, it draws warmth from external sources, becoming a receptive surface rather than a self-contained entity.
Hybridity constitutes a major axis of this practice, informed by a post-human understanding of the living. Beginning from an embodied process, Fernanda Galvão explores the possibility of extending the territory of the body. Her forms nourished by photographic, botanical, and scientific references, merge into unstable entities that evade fixed taxonomy. Anatomy becomes fluid, the boundaries between inside and outside dissolve in processes of osmosis. The serpentine structure extends this reflection through a dysmorphic dimension: the pictorial surface bends, stretches, and incarnates itself in space, compelling the viewer to physically experience transformation. Hybridity operates across architecture and painting, organism and planet, human and non-human, undoing oppositions between landscape and interiority, representation and experience. Echoing Lynn Margulis’s principle of “symbiosis everywhere”(3), life appears as a network of interdependencies in which no form exists in isolation. By granting agency to plants, materials, and even inert matter, Galvão proposes a world no longer centered on the human.
This speculative dimension brings her work close to science fiction. Painting becomes a laboratory for possible worlds governed by non-human logics. In this sense, Ursula K. Le Guin’s statement, “I don’t see a future for humans but for everybody else”(4) resonates as a poetic hypothesis rather than a prophecy. It is not a matter of announcing disappearance, but of redirecting attention toward other forms of life and other temporalities.
Painting no longer describes a world; it actualizes one. It neither illustrates nor explains but establishes an autonomous perceptual situation that transforms the exhibition space and our way of inhabiting it. Fernanda Galvão’s works open onto post-human landscapes in which metamorphosis and symbiosis replace control, and where the future already germinates within the vibrating thickness of pictorial matter.
Margaux Knight
1 Cauquelin, A. (2000). The invention of the landscape (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. (Original work published 1989)
2 Floc’h, N. (2019). Invisible: The colors of water. Arles, France: Actes Sud.
3 Margulis, L. (1998). Symbiotic planet: A new look at evolution. New York, NY: Basic Books.
4 Le Guin, U. K. (2017). No time to spare: Thinking about what matters. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
