The duration of metamorphoses is expressed to break the static nature of scientific drawing. As if everything mimicked by observation were on the verge of becoming something else. This same instant seems to guide the landscapes of the Brazilian artist Fernanda Galvão.
Equally attentive to the representational data of scientific manuals, the artist dissects, recombines, and metamorphoses specimens of tropical flora and images from cell biology to produce fictional realities of a distant future. Composed of amalgamated strata, her atmospheres incorporate the notion of duration. Expressed not only by the composition, where each element seems in constant fluidity and mutation, duration is an essential pictorial element: it can be perceived in each use of her materials — oil, charcoal, oil pastel, and dry pastel — through their gesturalities and rhythms.
Her canvases overflow with fluidity, as if the very essence of painting were challenged by the prospect of becoming something else. In this aspect, they do justice to the constant presence of cinema as a means of study and investigation for the artist. Many of the paintings resemble frames from a film, capturing a moment destined for change. It is no coincidence that many of Galvão’s fictional biomes depict wet and aquatic environments, evoking oceanic depths where many existences originate and end. Immersed in deep blues and blacks, her landscapes and inanimate beings retain something of the psyche itself, which insinuates itself between the dreamlike, memory, and fabulation.
Among corals, anemones, seaweeds, and scallops, new carnivorous plants emerge in these environments, heralding a new future. As in her most recent painting “Tube Feet, Spine Teeth” (2024), a large echinoderm surrounded by pedicellariae and ambulacral feet resembles a large mouth expelling and sucking up all that liquid. It is its scale and intense red that confer something animalistic and lively to the form, reinforcing the ambiguity and strangeness of its presence. The same operation employed for this kind of submarine tongue is used by the artist to highlight and distinguish certain elements and vegetation in her compositions.
