Restless with the abyss between reality and human perception, Nelson Porto (Rio de Janeiro, 1978) has been curious about the representation of the real since a young age. Perhaps because of this, his artistic work is developed in multiple supports, ranging from photography to virtual reality.
Son of a drawing teacher and a psychologist, he has always been interested in the way the brain decodes volumes through light and shadow, creating realities where only illusion exists. With photographic technique and visual sensibility as his foundation, his work mixes hyper-realistic colour pencil drawings, short video art films in timelapse and hyperlapse, and virtual reality. But photography itself is the space from which he continually draws his perceptions and where he re-projects meaning and visual language in experimentation that is both sensitive and complex.
In his first solo exhibition, 2013's "Root," he revisited material gathered from trips to Ethiopia, India and the Amazon in search of a precious shared ancestral human thread, of traces of an ancient culture that becomes fragmented and distant in our accelerated times. Another recurrent and transversal theme in Nelson's work is time, a dimension he explores through the movement of shadows, the texture of surfaces, and the eloquent voids of spaces in the interval between photographs.
In 2019, he took Virtual Reality to SP Foto again with the work Liquenscape, which united an immersive 360º 3D video piece, a gigapanorama of Itatiaia National Park, and a macro immersion in the fractal complexity of nature. The photograph "Water is Gold" was one of the highlights in the media for its relationship with the environment.
In 2021, Nelson resumed the theme of water with the series "The Surface of Water".