Alexandre Wagner: Fogo-Fátuo
Forthcoming exhibition
Overview
Photo: Sergio Guerini
Alexandre Wagner
Fogo-Fátuo
November 12 – December 18, 2026
New York
Kutlesa is pleased to announce Fogo-Fátuo, an exhibition of new works by São Paulo‑based artist Alexandre Wagner at the gallery’s New York location, marking the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.
Fogo-Fátuo, the Brazilian Portuguese term for will-o’-the-wisp, describes a fleeting phenomenon in which bluish or greenish flames appear above the ground, produced by gases released through the decomposition of organic matter. Most commonly associated with swamps and waterlogged terrain, these elusive lights emerge from the darkness, illuminating their surroundings without fully revealing them.
Selected Works
Press Release
Kutlesa is pleased to announce Fogo-Fátuo, an exhibition of new works by São Paulo‑based artist Alexandre Wagner at the gallery’s New York location, marking the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.
Fogo-Fátuo, the Brazilian Portuguese term for will-o’-the-wisp, describes a fleeting phenomenon in which bluish or greenish flames appear above the ground, produced by gases released through the decomposition of organic matter. Most commonly associated with swamps and waterlogged terrain, these elusive lights emerge from the darkness, illuminating their surroundings without fully revealing them.
It is within this atmosphere of obscurity and transformation that Alexandre Wagner’s paintings take shape. His works evoke an exuberant, almost voluptuous natural world in which the boundaries between image and material, recognition and abstraction, remain in constant flux. Rather than depicting landscape as a stable or identifiable subject, Wagner approaches it as a space of emergence—one in which forms are continually coming into being, dissolving, and reforming.
Vegetal and mineral structures appear to share a common visual language. Textures, rhythms, and contours migrate across the surface, at times suggesting distinct elements, at others collapsing their differences altogether. What initially appears recognisable gradually resists identification. Wagner’s paintings do not seek to reproduce the visible world so much as to evoke its underlying conditions, allowing landscape to unfold as an experience of perception rather than representation.
This ambiguity is inseparable from the artist’s working process. Applying an exceptionally thin, fluid layer of paint, Wagner works with a stiff brush that removes as much material as it deposits. Through repetitive, almost excavatory gestures, the surface is gradually worked back, revealing traces of colour and light beneath. The bristles leave delicate marks that accumulate into a complex field of movement, where the act of erasure becomes a means of construction.
The resulting images occupy an uncertain territory between emergence and disappearance. A sense of landscape persists, yet its constituent elements remain elusive: stone and water, earth and wind, vegetation and atmosphere become difficult to distinguish. Instead of organising nature into discrete categories, Wagner allows its forms to flow into one another, suggesting a world governed less by fixed identities than by transformation and interdependence.
Light assumes a central role within this process. Rather than illuminating the scene from an external source, it appears to rise from within the painted surface, flickering through layers of darkness and indistinction. Its presence does not resolve the image or render it entirely legible. Instead, light intensifies the uncertainty of what is seen, revealing fragments while leaving others suspended beyond perception.
In Fogo-Fátuo, painting becomes a negotiation between visibility and concealment, presence and absence. Wagner draws the viewer toward an image that continually recedes from definitive interpretation, sustaining a tension between what can be recognised and what remains beyond comprehension. Like the elusive phenomenon that gives the exhibition its title, his paintings offer brief illuminations within an otherwise inscrutable world. Mystery is not simply a subject within these works; it is the very condition through which they come into being.
Video
