'Mirroring Nature' - at Nara Roesler, New York
July 7th - August 22nd, 2026
A brilliantly hot NY August afternoon, thirty-five degrees Celsius, heat rising off the pavement into my thin sandals, I made my walk from Greenwich Street to Chelsea, up to 21st Street, to see "Mirroring Nature" at Nara Roesler gallery, the heat outside giving way at once to a fresh, pleasant breeze within, and I slowly read curator Luis Pérez-Oramas's own words: "Visual art has served, since time immemorial, as a mirror of nature. The most ancient remainders of human tracing depict natural forms, manifest indexical marks of bodies, take the appearance of undecipherable signs related to sacrificial ceremonial remnants, or commanding, monumental beasts, herd of animals, flying birds. In ancient Greece, painters were simply named zographoi, draftsmen of life, because depicting the life of natural beings seems consubstantial to artistic representation. But beyond mimetic or figurative representation, art can also model itself after the operational dynamism of nature.”
"Mirroring Nature" gathers Amelia Toledo, Berna Reale, Brígida Baltar, Bruno Dunley, Cao Guimarães, Dávila & Portillo, Cássio Vasconcellos, Jonathas de Andrade, Karin Lambrecht, Laura Vinci, Manoela Medeiros, Marcelo Silveira, Gego, Amparo de la Sota, Maria Klabin, and Gerardo Rosales, considering nature "not merely as a subject or landscape, but as a constellation of phenomena, forces, and forms of life through which the world is structured and continually transformed.”
I walked past the entry room, letting the air conditioning ease the heat from my body, until I reached the second, larger room, where I finally took a breath in front of Laura Vinci's Loose Leaves, its golden rain falling still, and Amelia Toledo's Singing Dragon, perforated sound stone and concrete, standing just below it, cooling me further into rest. In the same room, Jonathan de Andrade's The Water Spirits held a fisherman carrying a fish nearly his own size against a screen of palm and mangrove green, that same proximity between fish and fisherman he has spent his work following into the relationship between the human body and water. Standing in front of it, I kept returning to one thought: to draft life, rather than depict a landscape or arrange a still one.
Amelia Toledo’s Singing Dragon held that condition somewhere in its surface, ambiguous as to whether it had once been alive or was only ever mineral, still drafting life while above it the leaves fell, hung on nearly invisible threads, cast in metal but caught mid-fall, unwilling to commit to either flight or gravity. Nearby, Marcelo Silveira's Guides of Liedo, in cajacatinga wood, stood scorched and inscribed, a small mountain range of language burned into something that had once, unmistakably, been a living tree.
Even Dávila & Portillo's Nebula, all woven colour and celestial dust, felt less like an image of nature than an instance of it, matter gathering itself into form the way it does with or without a hand.
What moved me, walking through, was not nature reproduced but nature persisting, through fire, through thread, through the strange discipline of embroidery in Amparo de la Sota's Conexiones or Brígida Baltar's works made of brick dust and fog. Most of these artists are Brazilian, and I found myself thinking less about influence than about proximity, about how differently one drafts life when life itself is already growing just outside the studio door, the way it does at Lina Bo Bardi's Casa de Vidro* in São Paulo, its glass walls lifted on slender stilts above the forest floor, a tree still growing straight through the courtyard, seventy years on. Here, in a gallery on a cement floor in Manhattan, that nearness had to be summoned rather than assumed. And it was. That was the relief of it.
Before I stepped back out into the heat, I turned once more to Pérez-Oramas's own words, the ones that close his text: "By tirelessly mirroring nature, art tries to embrace the 'blind agent' that ceaselessly moves the world, after Lucretius' sounding verses in his masterful poem on the nature of things: 'For lurks this essence far and deep and under/Nor in our body is aught more shut from view/And 'tis the very soul of all the soul.’
"Mirroring Nature," curated by Luis Pérez-Oramas, is on view at Nara Roesler gallery in New York through August 22, 2026
Many thanks to Ton Martins, at Nara Roesler gallery, New York, for walking me through the exhibition and feeding me with valid information of the artists’ work.
Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House. Photo © Iñigo Bujedo Aguirre. (source : https://archeyes.com/glass-house-lina-bo-bardi/)
In 1951 Bo Bardi designed the "Casa de Vidro" ("Glass House") to live with her husband in what was then the remnants of the Mata Atlântica, the original rain forest surrounding São Paulo. Located on a 7,000-square-metre plot of land, it was the first residence in the Morumbi neighbourhood. The area is now the wealthy suburb of Morumbi, but a more domesticated version of the rain forest has since re-established itself around the house, concealing it from view.
The Casa de Vidro, also known as the Glass House, is a landmark of modernist architecture located in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Designed by renowned Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi in 1950, the house served as her and her husband Pietro Maria Bardi’s home for four decades. The name of the house is derived from its striking glass facade, which gives the illusion of floating due to its minimalist column structure. With its innovative design, the Casa de Vidro continues to be a symbol of Lina Bo Bardi’s avant-garde architectural style and is considered one of the most important works of modern architecture in Brazil.
