Gabriel Nehemy

Choosing painting as the main language in the 21st century requires courage from the contemporary artist, due to the historical importance of the medium, and, at the same time, it makes the plurality of the circuit accept well such a choice. Gabriel Nehemy, from São Paulo, thinks pictorially, even if he sometimes uses photography, drawing, and the three-dimensional. His poetic making is also close to collage, and, therefore, the bric-a-brac resulting from the routine and daily clash with frames, chassis, tubes, etc., gains a fluid configuration, in which chaos seems, at the same time, an axis and a catalyst.

For instance, we can select an untitled series from 2014 in which Nehemy uses cotton photo paper as a surface for experiments. On them, the artist spills, spreads, scratches, interferes in various ways. Scribbles, incomplete forms, graffiti, drippings, and corrugations appear, unregulated compositions that open an outstanding territory for the accidental. The photographic scope of the material seems to have more to do with the characteristics of texture, which emphasize the velvety tone and give depth to color, than with the reproducibility and automatic capture of this support. The pictorial, thus, gives the cards and spills over to the photographic surface other data, such as the invoicing and the use of space in a more demarcated way.