Gustavo Nazareno

Gustavo Nazareno is known for the range of sources that his work draws on, from personal and cultural histories, fables and religious tales to Renaissance painting and fashion photography. His output mostly comprises oil paintings and charcoal drawings, both notable for the artist’s deft manipulation of light and dark that recalls chiaroscuro, a technique of rendering illumination and shadow dating back to the fourth century. At Nazareno’s hand, the dizzying breadth of his reference points, encompassing the cultural and spiritual histories of Africa, Europe and his home of South America, is distilled into enigmatic images that cannot be consigned to a single artistic category or movement.

Born in Três Pontas, Brazil, in 1994, Nazareno moved to São Paulo in 2018 on the advice of his Aunt, a practitioner of the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda, who had experienced a vision from a minor deity known as an Orixá. Self-taught as an artist, he has spent the remainder of his career painting and drawing scenes that originate in fables that he writes about Orixás from the Candomblé and Umbanda religions. Within Nazareno’s practice, the boundary between faith, fiction and research is intentionally blurred, allowing him to call on all three to inspire his work. Each of his paintings begins with a sketch, which he then recreates in the form of tableaux vivants. For these, he dresses miniature wooden mannequins in garments that he creates, influenced equally by Haute Couture and traditional religious dress. When a sense of balance has been achieved, the image is painted, completing Nazareno’s elaborate process.

Ambiguity and duality are two cornerstones of Nazareno’s work, which seeks to interrogate tensions and similarities within various perceived binaries — fact and fiction, good and evil, God and man. The fables that his artworks reflect are set in a world where Orixás walk among us. “I do write about Orixás that exist, but I usually invent characters as well — not deities, but characters to create this syncretism between the human and divine”, he says. His allusions to fashion photography deepen this relationship between spirituality and everyday life, imbuing his subjects’ clothing with transcendental resonances.

Nazareno has been the subject of numerous institutional solo exhibitions in Brazil, most recently at the Museum of Modern Art Aloisio Magalhães in Recife (2024) and the Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araújo in São Paulo (2023). His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB) in São Paulo, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in New York and the Inhotim Institute in Brumadinho, among others. He will be the subject of a forthcoming solo exhibition curated by Danny Dunson at the DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center in Chicago, scheduled for spring 2026.