Gervane de Paula creates his artwork with a strong graphic character across paintings, drawings, photography, installations, and objects. His work carries a potent ecological appeal, alternating between melancholic tones and a powerful denunciatory charge. Festive scenes from his neighbourhood in Cuiabá, for example, complement the specific reality of the Brazilian Cerrado, while also vehemently addressing the socio-environmental disasters caused by large-scale agribusiness, unregulated mining, and their inextricable legacies of violence. The artist draws from and operates within an aesthetic shaped by images of mass consumption and the use of everyday materials from the Brazilian Midwest, alongside assertive references to art history. In his works, de Paula creates pseudofictional narratives depicting the hostility of large landowners and defenders of unchecked agribusiness when confronted with the critical questioning of art. Seeing his works as political and environmental denunciations that would prevent them from continuing their illicit activities, these figures retaliate with brutal force. De Paula often depicts shotguns, dead artists, rivers of blood, and plaques that honour political and environmental activists. Beyond environmental crimes, de Paula also addresses the social crime caused by the dynamics of agribusiness, including drug trafficking on the border between Mato Grosso and Bolivia, structural racism, police authoritarianism, and political corruption. At times, with sarcasm, he transposes certain power dynamics and hostilities onto the relationships within the art market itself. The artist has always been a victim of geographical isolation: living in Cuiabá, far from the Brazilian Southeast axis where the hegemonic market agents and art critics operate, his career, spanning over four decades, was long invisible and underestimated. 

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION:

Arte aqui é mártir (2017), oil and collage on wood, 85 × 70 cm. Courtesy of MT Projetos de Arte Collection; Bacia hidrográfica (2016), oil on canvas and steel, 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist; Pata (2014), collage on synthetic leather and plush, 35 × 43 × 17 cm and 49 × 26 × 14 cm. Courtesy of the artist