The writer and visual artist Thiago Barbalho discovered in drawing an expression form that overcame a crisis he had with words. Working in different dimensions and with different materials (colored pencils, graphite, spray, oil, oil pastel, and marker on paper), his compositions bring intricate universes to the public’s eye, in which shapes and colors intertwine and shuffle in narratives that seem to radicalize and endow the Hieronymus Bosch fantastic universe with a contemporary and lysergic air. With a background in Philosophy, Barbalho relies on philosophical concepts to guide his practice. In this sense, he understands drawing as an ancestral technology, which spans ages and cultures as a specific human species’ invention. The artist’s visual research leads him to see in the drawing the trace of a presence and the relationship between the mind—the imagination—and the body—the gesture—, between consciousness and reality.

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text: Nara Roesler gallery