Bruno Novelli constructs pictorial universes in which an exuberant nature serves as the stage for the presence of hybrid and anthropomorphic beings. Through the assimilation of images from scientific expeditions, ancestral mythologies, fantastic bestiaries, and traditions that run through the classical, the Gothic, and the modern, the artist develops a cosmogony of his own, in which historical references are reorganized through a singular imaginative key. His paintings, marked by intense colors and rhythmic patterns, activate space as an ornamental and narrative field at the same time. Coastal contours, dense forests, and hybrid chimeras are composed through meticulous drawings that suggest continuous movement, as if the landscape were in permanent mutation. Thick layers create translucent glazes and subtle reliefs, giving the figures an almost tactile presence — like images extracted from illustrated treatises and reinscribed in a mythical time. Although they evoke the scientific and encyclopedic imaginary, his works do not resolve themselves as record or classification: they operate, rather, as fabulation, establishing a territory in which knowledge and fantasy coexist as two faces of the same mechanism.
Bruno Novelli’s paintings explore a territory where nature, myth, and encyclopedic knowledge merge into a cosmogony of their own. Assimilating scientific expeditions, fantastic bestiaries, and traditions ranging from the classical to the Gothic, the artist reorganizes this repertoire through a fabulatory key: hybrid and anthropomorphic beings inhabit landscapes in permanent mutation, composed of meticulous drawings and intense colors that activate space as an ornamental and narrative field at the same time. The result is images that evoke the rigor of the Enlightenment treatise without surrendering to it — operating instead as the invention of a mythical time in which knowledge and fantasy are inseparable.
