Gustavo Nazareno (*1994) was raised in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and is now living and practicing in São Paulo.
Working across oil paintings and charcoals on paper, Nazareno sets off on a spiritual and visual exploration of the Orishas, deities venerated by the syncretic Brazilian Umbanda cult and other religions of the African diaspora related to the Yoruba, who found their way to most of the world as an emanation of the Atlantic slave trade.
Hybrid forces, ancestral spirits and mythological negotiators between human and divine world – prophets of wisdom and incarnation of historical legacies –, in Nazareno’s poetic universe the Orishas are glorious figures of a poignant pantheon where African traditions, Brazilian rituals, Spiritism and Catholicism coalesce.
Through the enigmatic light-and-shadow play and the depiction of divine entities and landscape alike as allegorical, universal manifestation of beauty, Nazareno ponders on the heterogenous attributes of identity and on the nebulous contours of our earthly experience as he confronts the persistence of colonialist narration.
