The Brooklyn Rail

All of André Griffo's paintings feel strung together, the wool filaments they often depict materializing a broader, conceptual weave. The works in Exploded View at Nara Roesler Gallery, Griffo's first solo exhibition outside of his home country of Brazil, are entwined with each other, extending beyond their frames to create a rich tapestry of metalinguistic layers, like in a Borgesian fiction. Jesus and His Theocratic Project for the 2000s 6 (2024), a mural hanging in the opening room of the show, contains the sketch of Constantine's Dream (2024), the watery, abstract painting hanging beside it. The Seller of Miniature Characters - Installation (2022), a set of small sculptures presented on a peddler's wrapping plastic, reappear in The Seller of Miniature Characters 8 (2024), a panorama on the wall right above the installation. The Place Where The Enemies Do Not Die 2 (2024) represents a dining room teeming with other paintings, some of which render other replicas inside them. Griffo’s mise en abyme scenarios depict the hectic history of Brazil qua plantation colony: images within images within images.

The Place Where the Enemies Do Not Die 2 also discloses the main themes of the exhibition, which Griffo has repeatedly returned to in his work: Christian iconography manifesting contemporary social issues, and the linear perspective of the Renaissance as a usable symbolic form. In all of these paintings, there is a transposition of religious allegories, like talking snakes and gesturing hands, and structures—the altar, the sacristy—to new embodiments of power, new sources of popular guilt and resentment. The Seller of Miniature Characters - Installation (2022), for example, portrays a set of collectible saint figurines but includes among them policemen, militiamen, drug dealers, and street prophets. In the series “Jesus and His Theocratic Project for the 2000s” (2021–24), Griffo equates the church's projects to the brute, current reality of Brazil by illustrating theologians alongside politicians and mobsters in quintessentially Portuguese, tin-glazed, ceramic panels.

The paintings function almost like parodies of Giotto and Fra Angelico, with subtle deformations in perspective that disrupt their precise spatial representations. Trained as an architect, Griffo knows how to bend graphical dispositions, creating illusions of depth and density, as with those crochet threads that jump magically between background and foreground in the “Farm Management Instructions” series (2018–24). The same happens with light: the abundance of radiant white spots produces untrue shadings and impossibly bright environments. Perhaps that's why the subway is such a privileged site for Griffo in “The Seller of Miniature Figures” (2021–24) and other series—the reflective tiles and upper light entrances evoke the ecclesiastical transcendence of a cathedral, and the repository of mass delirium flowing in the inner belly of the city, the subterraneous cravings of devotees.

Griffo playfully misinterprets not just the forms but also the contents of architectural spaces. Brazilian colonial chapels and farms merge with modern suburban houses, the tabernacles are cinctured by tablecloths or wallpapers with flower motifs, or accompanied by anachronistic wooden details and oneiric color schemes. In Farm Management Instructions 10 and 11 (both 2024), the spectator is drawn into a place of worship and an intimate bedroom simultaneously, eyes scanning through the coldness of the crucifix and the warmth of the lace curtains and pots of dumb cane plants so typical of South American homes. The works call to mind philosopher Gaston Bachelard's “poetics of space” in the way certain affects and registers of consciousness can condense into walls, corners, decorations. In many of Griffo's paintings, like those in the aptly-titled series “The Saint Suppressed by Ornaments” (2018–24), these effects shimmer from below the pictorial space, revealed by the scintilla of a pink, purple, and yellow backdrop, as if the depicted buildings were about to burst into multicolored flames. This backdrop reinforces the impression that these spaces are mere stage settings, scenographic locations that were carefully placed over a landscape of fermenting hues.

In the second room, which lends the exhibition its title, five works are assembled into a transversal, exploded-view diagram, highlighting Griffo's fluctuation between genres and scales—from huge canvases of smooth surfaces and sharp contours to maximalist puzzles of minuscule adornments in rococo shapes. Like classicism, Baroque elements proliferate in Griffo's work, especially of the weird, late-Brazilian Baroque of artists like Manoel da Costa Ataíde. In The Saint Suppressed by Ornament 3 and 4 (both 2024), contorted cherubim hold severed heads and blocks of plaster turn gilded volutes into amorphous foliages of pigment. In Jesus and His Theocratic Project for the 2000s 6 (2024), micro-humanoids, out of a Jonathan Swift fable or a Hieronymus Bosch triptych, crawl from under the floorboards, reaching to a fake sky drawn in the dome vault. The wool filaments so dear to Griffo delineate geometric plots of land to be worked on by tiny Black campesinos in Farm Management Instructions III (2024). The Incarnated (2024), a statue of Christ atop a sculpted monolith holds a shiny wire tangled in a Gordian knot. Made of gold—the mining of which defined Brazilian colonization and its Baroque art—the wire is an opulent version of the strings that appear in Griffo’s paintings, materially and metaphorically, connecting them. Its linearity and convolution reveal a conception of Brazilian history and betray the spectral origin of power in the country, as suggested throughout the show: a violent, if beautiful, faith.