Animism

FEMA Gallery – Cascais, 2025
By Gabriela Melzer

FEMA Gallery, in partnership with Galatea, presents Animism, the first solo exhibition by artist Gabriela Melzer (São Paulo, 1999). The exhibition consists of twelve paintings that invite the viewer to inhabit a space where the visible and the invisible coexist, and where time, energy and perception intertwine in a unique way. Gabriela Melzer lives and works in São Paulo. Having lived in New York, she was able to further her studies in painting and drawing at The New School and the Art Students League. This formative path echoes in her artistic research, marked by the creation of organic forms that emerge from the alternation between movement and color. In a context saturated by immediacy and the acceleration of information and events, Melzer seeks to establish a counterpoint by evoking the dilated time of contemplation, in which the gaze is invited to rest and explore the fluidity of her compositions. Inspired by the forms that are both random and ordered that we find in nature—its fractals, imperfections, and repetitions—the artist constructs interior landscapes that dialogue with the intangible and the unnameable. As in a permanently open game, the chromatic dance and the dense, rounded contours of her paintings invite the viewer to navigate through the interstices of the painting, where each deviation suggests new layers of meaning.

This visual space conceived by Melzer is dynamic: shapes and colors disintegrate and reorganize themselves continuously, reflecting the impermanence of reality. Each canvas presents itself as an open process, in which the pictorial gesture does not seek to fix an instant, but to capture an energy in constant transformation. In the wake of lyrical abstractionism, her work dissolves the boundaries between the physical and the ethereal, creating a sensory field in which the viewer finds themselves immersed and challenged to expand their perception. Her paintings reject any static resolution; with each layer of color, with each overlapping of form, new possibilities for interpretation emerge.

About the process of creating this exhibition, Melzer comments:

“As I delved deeper into my research for the exhibition, I realized that the idea of ​​animism as a belief that all elements present in this world can have a soul speaks volumes to the flow that I explore in my work. In the paintings that I present, animism thus appears as a kind of engine, as a living pictorial force. My interest was to investigate what this movement is, why it captures the eye, how this interplay between the viewer and the multiple canvases that make up each work takes place, and how they can be understood as a kind of living organism.”

The term that gives the exhibition its title manifests itself as a vibrant presence in each canvas. Echoing the belief that there is no separation between the spiritual world and the physical world and that all things have a soul and energy, Melzer’s animism reminds us that each element carries its own strength, a vitality that transcends matter. The colors, gestures and spaces between the forms act as intermediaries between the sensible world and that which is invisible, offering an experience that connects the viewer to a field of subtle energies. Animism here is not just a metaphor; it is experienced in the perception of the work, which reveals itself as a living organism, in which matter and spirit coexist, interact and transform.