Werllayne Nunes is a painter from Brazil.  His artwork, influenced by extensive travel through South America, provides counter-narratives to the culture industry’s depiction of the impoverished. Nunes completed graduate study at Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Madrid. His paintings have been shown in galleries, museums and public spaces in Madrid, New York, Miami, Houston, and Brazil.

Faces, colors, and cultural and religious traditions from my native Brazil and other African diasporic countries are the subjects of my current series of paintings. My main interest lies in challenging the ways in which the media typically portrays peoples from the Global South. Photos and other visual images often depict a one-dimensional people whose identities are defined solely by helplessness and powerlessness stemming from their socioeconomic conditions. This recurrence of these images ascribes a superficial identity to people from these regions and fails to recognize their agency. Using these images as a starting point, I lift figures out of their depicted contexts and place them in colorful backgrounds that recall patterns of contemporary design in order to counter representations of people of the Global South as primitive. I then juxtapose these portraits with images that represent cultural or religious symbols in order to create a kind of visual magical realism characterized by the simultaneous existence of two conflicting perspectives—reality and fantasy.

The fusion of styles expresses the positive spiritual elements that can emerge from harsh physical and social realities such as poverty and repression. Through this visual strategy, I hope to reclaim and reveal the multifaceted identities of the Global South. Be it the young child in Jogo sem fronteiras (A no limits game) with her favorite toy—her homemade soup can stilts—or the old woman in Na terra de Oshumare who finds solace in her pipe, each figure draws on a small object that is part of their daily reality to evoke and affirm their inner fantasies. By representing these snapshots of personal agency, I want these figures to emanate the art of living.