More than human: Gustavo Nazareno’s Bará Series

04 March 2025

Gustavo Nazareno’s first exhibition with Opera Gallery, ‘Orixás: Personal Tales on Portraiture’, was the artist’s largest London solo presentation to date. Alongside oil paintings portraying a range of Orixás, minor deities worshipped within a number of Afro-Latin vernacular religions, it contained 25 charcoal drawings from an ongoing series titled Bará. In an interview to coincide with the exhibition’s opening, he explained its significance: “It’s a place where I have united all of my references and my desires to please my eye, my soul, my religion, my faith.”

The Bará series began in 2018, when Nazareno moved from Minas Gerais, the southeastern Brazilian state where he was born, to São Paulo. Here, he found a studio that allowed him to pay his rent in drawings and initiated the series. The images, all rendered in intense monochrome, depict human-like bodies in various states of contortion and distortion. Limbs fold, stretch and tangle into impossible configurations. At first glance, they resemble photographs taken in a harshly-lit studio. On further inspection, though, their improbability is revealed.

The images exist somewhere between art and worship, each one being an offering to Eshu (also spelt Exu), a trickster Orixá sometimes known as Elegbará. Eshu is understood to be the linking conduit between the pantheon of Orixás and the mortal world. As such, he is often depicted in a human-like form, allowing Nazareno to depict him in drawings that resemble anatomical studies. In the artist’s words, “this deity that I’m portraying is the deity of the human body: movement, dance, blood, action, desire. In this series, I isolate the body, applying intense light and shadow to it.”

In his essay “Guided by Exu: The Creative Odyssey of Gustavo Nazareno”, historian Jonathan Square expands on Eshu’s place in culture, religion and spirituality:

“Exu is the key. In the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, every ceremony begins with an offering to Exu, the deity of crossroads, opportunities, and communication. Exu opens the pathways between the physical and spiritual realms, making him an essential figure in any ritual.”^[1]

Indeed, Nazareno’s act of creating itself is a testament to Eshu’s symbolic and ceremonial importance. His use of charcoal on paper—an easily smudged medium where a single mistake can ruin an image—brings a tangible intensity to the Bará series. He crouches on the ground, working across the paper until, fatigued, he achieves the near-photorealism these works are known for. In this process, the very act of art-making becomes ceremonial.

Another guiding light in Nazareno’s visual world is fashion photography. Its influence can be seen across his oeuvre — from the haute couture-inspired outfits worn by the subjects of his paintings to the dramatic and striking shapes cut by figures in the Bará series. These works belong to a lineage that goes back to photographers including Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, both of whose monochromatic photographs foreground the many physical possibilities of the human body: stillness, movement, softness, severity, familiarity and strangeness.

Though virtuosic application of all six attributes can be found in Nazareno’s drawings, it is in the last — strangeness — that he is able to fully eclipse any photographer. Inherently, photographing a human subject means creating a human image. Drawing, on the other hand, opens the artist to a world of more-than-human formal possibilities. In charcoal on paper, a body’s form can reach new degrees of flexibility and extension. Indeed, if you look closely at Bará’s subjects, you will begin to experience them as a procession of physical outliers, bending and stretching themselves into impossible shapes. A perpetual student of photography, Nazareno is uniquely placed to understand and surpass the medium’s limitations.

Throughout history, many of the most important artworks have been part of an artist’s ongoing enquiries into a single subject, medium or theme. In the 19th century, J. M. W. Turner painted the Thames countless times, seeing and depicting a new subtlety in the river each time he returned to it. In the 1960s, Niki de Saint Phalle began sculpting Nanas, her best-known body of work, which she continued to develop until her death in 2002. German painter Gerhard Richter began experimenting with the squeegeeing method in the 1980s, a technique for which he is now known, and continues to do so today. Bará might well be the next such body of work. Last year, Nazareno reflected on the history and future of the series: “It’s my first body of work and I think it will be with me forever.”

A selection of new works from the series will be featured in Nazareno’s forthcoming exhibition ‘Bará’ at Opera Gallery Bal Harbour, which will run from 6–29 March 2025 alongside ‘Afro-Latin Baroque’, an exhibition of his oil paintings at Opera Gallery Miami. Both exhibitions coincide with the artist’s inclusion in ‘One Becomes Many’, a group exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum.