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Artist Talk: Werllayne Nunes
Saturday, February 16, 2008 2-4pm
Werllayne Nunes will discuss his art and present a slide presentation.
Diaspora Vibe Gallery is pleased to present Dança das Cores na Nação Zumbi (Dance of the colors in the Zumbi Nation) by Werllayne Nunes. Werllayne Nunes is a Gainesville, Florida -based, self-taught painter from Brazil. Influenced by his father's artistic tendencies, he started painting at a very early age. As a teenager, Werllayne began to hone his other main interest--medicine-- and left Brazil to study medicine in Bolivia and Spain. His travels in South America and Europe helped him to evolve as a painter and influenced his eventual decision to devote his attention fulltime to his art.
Throughout his career, he has participated in solo and collective exhibitions in Brazil, Bolivia, Spain, and the United States. His current series of paintings reflects African and African-American peoples and cultures. Werlayne's work combines elements of photorealism and abstract expressionism to create a visual magical realism. This magical realism is characterized by the simultaneous existence and cohesion of two conflicting perspectives--reality and fantasy. Through this fusion of styles, he attempts to express positive spiritual elements that can emerge from harsh physical and social realities such as poverty and repression. His paintings are snapshots that capture a particular moment of happiness or creativity that transcends these difficult realities. These portraits are based mainly on photographs of children and elderly, since they express the unique sensitivity and energy of the future or the past. These groups are at once the most vulnerable to such sufferings and the most imaginative in using their minds and experiences to create a virtual and spiritual world that transforms their reality. Be it the young child with her favorite toy--her soup can stilts--or the old woman who finds solace in her pipe, these people emanate the art of living.
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