João Trevisan: White Flower

Megan Mulrooney is thrilled to present White Flower, an exhibition of new paintings by Brazilian artist João Trevisan featuring two complementary bodies of work, the landscapes of Lugar Selvagem and the Monochromes. The exhibition marks the artist's first presentation in Los Angeles and will be on view from November 7 - December 19, 2026.

Both the Lugar Selvagem and the Monochrome works are intimately scaled and meditate on memory, perception, and the passage of time. In the Landscapes, each composition follows the same structure: a dark sky and a low line of mountains embracing a curving lake at the center. Trevisan builds the surface from short vertical strokes, leaving the paint in ridges and grooves across the linen. Color rises out of a near-black ground, as an ochre or red glow along the horizon or a band of teal on the water.

The places depicted in Trevisan's landscapes are what the artist describes as condensations of memories that can no longer be fully recovered. Having begun series in 2020, following the death of his father, he draws on recollections of childhood trips to his grandmother's house in the peaceful mountains of southern Minas Gerais while composing the works. He imagines the resulting landscapes as a place of rest and reconciliation.

While the imagery in the Landscapes is assembled from fragments of memories, in the Monochromes, the process is reversed: an image is established and subsequently obscured beneath successive layers of paint. Each painting begins with a ground built from more than ten layers of white gesso followed by more than ten layers of diluted black paint. Over this ground, Trevisan establishes a series of vertical bars with clipped corners, derived from the wooden sleepers of a railway line that crosses Brazil. The forms recall the artist's walks along railway tracks, where the repeated intervals of the sleepers established a rhythm of movement and observation.

Once the bars are painted, Trevisan covers the surface in a single color: violet-blue, red, orange, teal, moss green, rust, lavender, cream, mauve, plum, olive, yellow, or slate blue. The final layers interact with the colors of the underlying forms and the dark ground, producing variations that shift according to the light. In the mauve canvas, for instance, the two center bars run pink while the outer three sink toward plum; in the rust, the bars read lighter than the field around them. From across the room, the cream painting looks nearly blank. Up close, textural differences also emerge: the weave of the line and the fine vertical brushstrokesthe same hand as the landscapes, broken at intervals into stacked sections.

In encountering work by Brazilian Concrete painters such as Willys de Castro as well as 1960s minimalist painters like Agnes Martin, Trevisan identified the possibilities that these painting styles allowed within his own practice. The Monochromes series subtitle, Diffused Light, describes the optical experience these surfaces produce. Light interacts with the successive layers of paint, altering the visibility of the forms beneath. What appears uniform at first can become increasingly complex with sustained attention: colors seem to merge or separate, forms emerge and recede, and distinctions that were initially apparent may disappear altogether. These effects change with the viewer's position and the surrounding light, so that the same painting can offer markedly different experiences over the course of an encounter.

The exhibition title, White Flower, recalls a more personal memory. Following a bicycle accident and a period of depression, Trevisan began taking early-morning rides, paying close attention to the textures, colors, and sensations of the world around him. He would sometimes stop to pick a jasmine flower, carrying it home to his mother, who would kiss it in gratitude. It is a small ritual that has remained with him, one of those seemingly ordinary experiences whose details persist in memory long after the moment itself has passed. "A large part of what I do is about this," Trevisan writes, "about these small things that remain in memory." As he puts it, "The landscape is a memory of the image; the monochrome, a memory that remains after the image."

João Trevisan is a Brazilian painter and sculptor based in São Paulo. He holds bachelor's degrees in law and geography. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Museu da Inconfidência, Ouro Preto; Simões de Assis, Curitiba; Galerie SLAG&RX, Paris; Museu de Arte Sacra, São Paulo; and Adelina Institut, São Paulo. His work is held in numerous public collections throughout Brazil, including Museu Nacional da República, Brasília; Museu de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro; Museu de Arte do Rio; Museu de Arte de Ribeirão Preto; Casa de Cultura da América Latina, Brasília; and Museu de Artes Plásticas de Anápolis.