There’s a kind of liquid geology in Dani Fontenelle’s art. Her canvases aren’t just painted
surfaces — they’re landscapes where color runs free, where the material finds its own path,
and gravity becomes a co-creator. She doesn’t paint scenery; she orchestrates the birth of
emotional ecosystems. In her studio — a sanctuary carved out from a multifaceted life in law
and business — Dani found true freedom through surrender, turning painting into an act of
faith in the unpredictable.
When this world of flow meets the Amazon, the resonance is seismic. An artist who "paints
what spills" finds herself face to face with the planet’s largest water system. But this
connection runs deeper than visual similarities. It’s a matter of soul. Dani draws the parallel
herself: her creative rhythm, like the rivers, depends on what’s happening inside her. “When I
feel good on the inside,” she says, “my energy to paint flows naturally… When I’m not well, I
don’t flow on the outside either.” Her art isn’t an image of the forest — it’s an extension of her
life force, running in unison with the rivers that are the planet’s veins.
In her palette, the Amazon reveals its essential duality. The first color that emerges,
unsurprisingly, is “an immensity of green.” It’s the color of life, “constantly being born and
reborn,” overflowing across her canvases in organic compositions — as if photosynthesis
itself were happening beneath the layers of paint. But other colors burn in her awareness.
When asked what shades could awaken collective consciousness, her response is
immediate and piercing: “The orange and red of wildfires.” In her work, beauty is never naïve.
It holds the tension of a forest that “whispers and screams” at once — a mystical, spiritual
place that is also a body in pain.
For Dani, the Amazon is a spiritual territory — a space where the visible and invisible are
intertwined. Hidden in the layers of her abstract forms are forces we can’t see, but that guide
us: ancestry, intuition, the sacred. “The forest is mysterious, mystical,” she says. “Much of it
still unexplored.” And her paintings follow that same principle: they don’t try to explain — they
aim to preserve the mystery.
What she offers the viewer is atmosphere. Stillness. Presence. The experience of viewing a
piece by Dani Fontenelle feels much like stepping into the forest: first comes the silence, then
the vertigo. A vertigo of color, of intuition, of belonging. “We try too hard to explain the
Amazon,” she says. “Maybe we just need to feel it.”
The Color of Consciousness
Dani Fontenelle