“Chicken”

Behind the poetic lightness of Dunley’s works are layers of overlapping, highly worked paint, beneath which the texture of the support disappears. Paradoxically, this procedural complexity works to imprint visual simplicity, resulting in diffuse anti-images, diluted in the brushstrokes that retouch and melt contours. The artist’s “hand,” the gesture that marks the presence of the subject in the work and its questioning, its negation, are not lost or attenuated; they are fundamental elements of a painting that stands as a testimony of the time in which it emerges.

The fleeting figuration that is imposed in these circumstances is, rather, a doubt about the reality around us, about the objectivity of the perception of the world, and not a positivist affirmation of the meaning of events. Hence the evidence of retouching, corrections of features and errors that leave their mark like scars.

According to the artist: “There is a varying visuality among the most recent works. There is a change in the function of the image, a disbelief in a single path of representation, a disbelief in the affirmation of the unity of the work and its identity through a style - a strongly demarcated visual repetition. It is through the articulation between ways of doing, forms of visibility and a reflection on their relationships, which implies the construction of an effectiveness, that the work supports and asserts itself.”

Among his exhibitions, the following stand out: "New New Art", at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (2009) and "The First 10 Years", at the Tomie Ohtake Institute (2011). Among his solo exhibitions, the highlights are "e" at the Maria Antonia University Center (2013) and the show "No lugar em que já Estamos", at the Nara Roesler Gallery (2014); "The Mirror", Nara Roesler Gallery | New York, New York City/NY, USA (2018); XXXIII São Paulo International Art Biennial – "Affective Affinities" (group show, 2018).

Among his most recent achievements, his work "Vista", from 2016, was included in the collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo during the preview of SP-Arte 2017.