Bruno Dunley: No Meio

Galeria Nara Roesler | São Paulo presents No Meio (In the Middle), a solo show featuring 24 works created by Bruno Dunley between 2015 and 2018, alongside text by Tadeu Chiarelli. The critic points out that artists react in different ways to the ocean of images that reaches everyone. “There are those who gladly drown in the murky waters of the internet, hunting for icons that can be processed into ‘works,’ and those who, like Dunley, although immersed in those same and driven to search them for food for their productions, resist drowning in the undercurrents of the innocuous which rule the depths of said ocean.”

Chiarelli discusses the show’s eponymous painting, No meio (2016), which can be understood as an emblem for artists who resist the naturalization of this imagistic overload. “presents itself as a mirror which apparently reflects nothing, carrying the inscription “no meio” (written, not reflected).”

The curator points out that the paintings Dunley has been putting out in recent years are replete with mirrors of this kind, which do not reflect the world, but mark a precise spot at the center of many of his creations. “By making these artworks, situated as they are between the affirmation of pictorial artmaking and the presence of signs from that ocean of images that has been definitively made into our new first nature, Dunley seems to find, in these blind mirrors he makes, the last fortress, or the last lighthouse to guide him, preventing him from submerging for good.”