Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present the first New Orleans exhibition of Caio Fonseca and Gustavo Bonevardi.

Caio Fonseca, well known for his lyrical, abstract paintings, explores the interaction of form and tonality. His densely painted surfaces focus on texture and hue, beginning with a multicolored painting coupled with thick overlays of white paint that are used to reveal arches, curves, and rectangles. Fonseca’s practice embraces early twentieth century modernism and the traditional principles of abstraction, however, he has established his own stylized vernacular through which to explore these concepts. Fonseca’s practice is also partly influenced by his training and interest in classical music and composition. Similar to musical arrangements, Fonseca’s technique for creating a painting is a process of both structured planning and moment-to-moment improvising.

Gustavo Bonevardi’s graphite on paper drawings and stone sculptures can be described as precise, minimal, and restrained. These works are meditative while also achieving a quiet expressiveness. Trained as an architect, Bonevardi’s practice is meticulous and, similar to Fonseca’s, exhibits a structured plan along with a sense of improvisation. His graphite on paper drawings are comprised of thousands of tiny hand-drawn letters that are perfectly positioned so that upon close inspection they stand as individual forms that could seemingly interlock. From afar, however, they unify to become a modulation that delineates the shape of a circle, a geometric form, or an abstraction. Bonevardi’s disordered placement of these letters evokes a fragmented language that creates an interplay of absence, density, and space thereby instigating a sense of memory and loss.

Caio Fonseca lives and works between New York City and Pietrasanta, Italy. Fonseca has exhibited internationally in museums and galleries. He has had retrospectives at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, Spain. His work is included in many public and private collections, including the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of America Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Bonevardi lives and works in New York City and is a graduate of the Princeton School of Architecture. Along with his works on paper and sculptures, Bonevardi also draws on his architectural background when working on his large-scale urban projects. Examples of which include the memorial, Tribute in Light (conceived in 2001 and illuminated each year in New York in commemoration of September 11th) and 10,000 Flower Maze, Shenzhen Citizen’s Plaza, China.