Curated by Denise Mattar, Ismael Nery – In Search of Essence presented a comprehensive overview of the artist’s production through 61 works, including paintings and watercolors, as well as a selection of his own poems.

Nery swam against the current of both academic traditions and modernist trends: his work did not seek the social or the beautiful, nor did it advocate a radical break from the past. A mystic and a Catholic at a time when much of the intellectual sphere championed atheism, he developed a universal visual language just as his peers were delving into nationalism.

The central subject of Nery’s work is the human being—stripped, intentionally, of any reference to time or place. A figure searching for the self and its fusion with the other; attempting to understand itself in the mirror’s reflection, only to be confronted by an unfamiliar face. In his portraits and self-portraits, Nery reveals both the divine and the demonic self, the masculine and the feminine. He merges with his friend, the poet Murilo Mendes, and with his wife, the poet Adalgisa Nery—one of his greatest inspirations—alongside the echoes of a tragic family history.

Fusion is a constant theme throughout his work: bodies intertwine, overlap, devour one another, and are reborn in new forms, always within a mythical dimension.

Within Nery’s limited output—estimated at only about one hundred oil paintings—drawing holds a central place. The freedom of the medium suited his rapid, intuitive thinking. Especially in his later works, Nery achieved a sharpness and subtlety that position him as a forerunner of contemporary art.