Gustavo Nazareno

Gustavo Nazareno is known for the range of sources that his work draws upon, from personal and cultural histories, fables, and religious tales to Renaissance painting and fashion photography. 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, following a spiritual vision involving an orixá. Within Nazareno’s practice, spiritual knowledge, fictional narratives, as well as historical and visual research are brought into dialogue, forming interconnected sources for his work. His research also encompasses ornithology, astrophysics, and theoretical physics, which inform the creation of his stories and the development of his paintings. The Afro-Brazilian Baroque likewise forms an important part of his visual and conceptual vocabulary.

His work frequently engages with Exú, the orixá of communication, movement, transformation, and the crossroads, who mediates between the human and spiritual realms. Another recurring theme in his paintings is the African diasporic spiritual traditions in Brazil, as well as the presence and transformation of Yoruba cosmologies within Afro-Brazilian religious traditions. Through paintings and drawings in oil and charcoal, the artist develops a body of work in which portraiture takes on a new dimension within the pictorial context. 

Against opaque, light-coloured backgrounds, Nazareno’s Black figures emerge with a commanding physical and psychological presence. The precisely defined contours of the figures reveal the technical refinement he has honed throughout his career to date. This mastery is deeply rooted in his extensive study of human anatomy, a subject he has explored as a self-taught artist from an early age.

Ambiguity and duality are two cornerstones of Nazareno’s work, which seeks to interrogate tensions and similarities within various perceived binaries—history and invention, good and evil, the human and the divine. The fables reflected in his artworks 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.

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. Once a sense of balance has been achieved, the image is painted, completing Nazareno’s elaborate process.

Nazareno’s work can be found in public collections including Projeto Afro, São Paulo; Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araújo, São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães (MAMAM), Recife; Instituto Collaço Paulo, Santa Catarina, Brazil; and Cornell University, New York, USA. He has also been the subject of numerous institutional solo exhibitions in Brazil, including at the Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães in Recife (2024) and the Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araújo in São Paulo (2023).