Bruno Dunley was born in Petrópolis, Brazil, and lives and works in São Paulo. His work questions the pictorial premise of painting, in particular, the relations between representation and an individual and collective consciousness. Departing from either found or fictional images, his paintings start as carefully constructed compositions, slowly suffering erasure which, at times, reveal gaps in the apparent continuity of perception. Part of a new generation of Brazilian painters named 2000&8, his work departs from photographs but removes their indexical quality, focusing more on volume and the play of colors in proximity to each other in order to create figures through layers of effacement. The predominance of this minimalist visual language lends a meditative quality to some of his paintings in which, very often, a single color dominates the whole plane.
Read More"What I paint are approximations, poetic figures, which speak to the uncertainty and the doubt that I think are part of my poetry, I see my work as a series of questions and statements about the possibilities of painting, what it is, and what we expect from it." In his works, promises are constructed and consequently broken, taking the viewer into a game of tension where both work and viewer constantly test each others limits. Preconceived notions of painting and composition are incessantly challenged in surprising ways.
Recent exhibitions include the solo Bruno Dunley, at 11 Bis, Paris (2012); as well as the group shows Os primeiros 10 anos, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Assim é se lhe parece, at Paço das Artes (both in São Paulo, 2011); and Paralela 2010, at Liceu de Artes e Ofícios de São Paulo (2010).
