Nature Speaking

Curated by Carola Del Pizzo

We have become accustomed to viewing the natural world as a realm in contrast, alien, distinct (and distant) from humanity. On one side lies the artificial universe, the crowning achievement of Promethean ingenuity: it stems from rationality imbued with the ambition for discovery and conquest instilled in us by Ulysses and his endless journey away from home. On the opposite, there is nature: sometimes a cornucopia to exploit, some others an adversary to contain, and on many other occasions a fragile, ailing home to protect. However, any of these frameworks within which we encase the natural world implies the practice of listening to its voice—or rather, voices.

Listening requires suspending the urge to speak and exposing yourself to unpredictable sounds, potentially unheard and non-preordained. It means a radical opening to harmonizing yourself with others, renouncing a prewritten score. This harmonization is the practice honed by the eyes of Adonis Galvão, with the patience of seasonal cycles, the blooming of plants, and the migratory flows of birds. In a vibrant synthesis of hyperrealist detailing and geometric abstraction, Adonis’ paintings recount the wondrous encounters of his gaze with the tropical vegetation and its iridescent inhabitants. The painter’s hyperrealism in capturing the greenish-blue details of his parrots—the protagonists of the Passaredo series—serves as a messenger of the material spirituality that underpins his dialogue with nature, which he observes with the respect of a priest and the innocent wonder of a child. The geometries traced by the perch and the dark circles appearing in his canvases provide an abstract counterpoint that recurs in his art: shaped by Adonis’ brush, mathematics becomes not an instrument of homogenization and rationalization but rather the alphabet of a shared melody, polyphonic yet audible and shared by all beings.

Listening to others also entails listening to yourself: there is no room to embrace another’s voice if yours has not found the peace necessary to grant silence. This peace blooms from giving yourself space for expression, embodying the freedom that perhaps most deeply unsettles the foundations of the self. To express freely, you must confront your reflection, diving even into its darkest and unexplored recesses. The outstretched fingers and curved backs in Alexandre Vianna’s photographic series Cura evoke the inner rifts of a soul compelled to meet itself in the truth of its solitude: beneath the veneers with which we dress our public identities lie bodies pulsing with ancient pains, secret joys, and unspoken hopes. Thus, what tears when you face the most authentic facets of yourself is first the veil of superficial coherence with which we hastily conceal them. Within these fractures lie the seeds of the encounter with otherness. This is the narrative behind the two works from the Quantum series, where the veils— in Cura suffocatingly diaphanous prisons for authenticity—return as temporary nests for self-searching, resonating chambers for one’s inner colors. The expanded photographs Revel and Embrace—emerging from a performative moment where subjects are enveloped in translucent fabric and surrounded by specific sound frequencies that promote introspection—teach that healing the relationship with your differences is the prelude to embracing and reconciling with those of others.

An ethereal point of contact between Adonis’ listening and Alexandre’s self-listening is drawn by the artistic gestures of Beatriz Basso, whose delicate spontaneity possesses the acuity to traverse the armors of the most irreconcilable worlds. The Leap, with its essential black and white strokes, acts as a guide to finding the courage to journey inward, with the same spirit you bring to venturing into a forest in search of the soothing touch of its trees and shadows. Beatriz’s hands, moving lightly as if weaving the invisible counsel of the fairies and spirits of the forest from her Brazilian childhood, reveal paths to breathe in your emotions with the calm they require to be lived in their multifaceted chromatic bouquet. The greens and blues—along with creams, central players in Beatriz’s artistic journey of the past year, inextricably linked to the milestones of her emotional biography—resonate with the warmth of spring mornings, where the brisk night air greets budding branches, and the sun’s gentle yellow rays varnish the sky with morning clarity. Beatriz’s emotional landscapes uniquely evoke true correspondences between inner life and the natural world, without reducing nature to a servile herald of human sensitivity. They guide us to see with the awareness that the most genuine geography is not written on solid maps but on an infinite stack of translucent papers, through whose transparency and overlapping layers, new universes of meaning continually unfold.

This final facet of listening is exquisitely revealed through the lens of Bia Serranoni. Bia’s chiaroscuro photographs show that listening also means grasping the interstices of sense capable of rewriting our narratives, leading us to reinterpret our most unshakable and monumental certainties. The undisputed monumentality of architectural structures —primary interlocutors of Bia’s lens— is reimagined through light and reflections visible only to those ears trained to silence the echoes of their perspective. Her photographs let the spaces between and within things speak, unveiling new constellations with the power to open pathways through rigid determinism. No structure framed by Bia fails to emerge as a fertile greenhouse of utopian buds, a “NeverLand” which—unlike Peter Pan’s—astonishingly begins to be an "ExistingLand".

La natura che parla (Nature speaking) celebrates listening through four precious perspectives as the only act able to foster a relationship with the natural world. A relationship that, Adonis tells us, regards nature not as a backdrop but as a dialogue partner; one born, as Alexandre reminds us, not from the condescending conviction of being the chosen ones to protect it, but from a humble desire to heal and be healed; a relationship that, Beatriz suggests, becomes a mirror to (re)cognize and challenge yourself; and one that, Bia concludes, fearlessly inhabits uncertainties and silences, glimpsing the guiding stars of alternative pathways.