Gustavo Nazareno, 'How to Grow a Flower from a Supernova'

Opera Gallery Paris is pleased to present ‘How to Grow a Flower from a Supernova’, a solo exhibition of new paintings and charcoal drawings by Brazilian artist Gustavo Nazareno. 

Gustavo Nazareno is known for the range of sources that his work draws on, from personal and cultural histories, fables and Afro-Latin religions to Renaissance painting and fashion photography. 

Taking place during Paris Haute Couture Week, the new series of 24 paitings and 10 charcoal drawings combines devotional imagery with symbolic and structural language of fashion. The show is conceived as an offering to Pomba Gira—female deity of Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion—embodying beauty, seduction and transformation. 

Clothing takes centre stage. Inspired by the most visionary designers, Nazareno creates pieces that seem to escape the body to become landscapes, clouds or celestial veils. The figures are there to reveal the attire, to dance, to celebrate, as in a sacred ceremony. 

The title reveals Nazareno's attraction to astrophysics: 

"I love supernovas. I love that, depending on where a star explodes, I might be able to see it from Earth. I was reading about Betelgeuse and how it is expected to explode in the next 100,000 years or so, and the thought that, if it exploded now, I would be able to see it made me really emotional. It’s the nerd in me. I love physics and astrophysics, and I instantly wanted to bring that emotion into what I was creating: a flower born from a supernova. Part of what I intended for the garments in the paintings was to sew something that could relate to botany, almost as if you were on another planet and saw how a certain type of vegetation would grow there." 

Nazareno translates this raw sense of awe in the face of the cosmos’s immensity into painting: a flower emerging from a stellar explosion, a metaphor for a transformation between destruction and creation.