FOLIO
PORT
Dani Fontenelle
“There’s nothing mandatory in art,
because art is free.”
Wassily Kandinsky
Dani Fontenelle’s art is born at the precise point where
gesture dissolves and matter takes control.
Nothing in it is calculated. Paint acts on impulse, color
moves by instinct, and time takes part as a silent witness.
Each work is the result of an event: the painting is not made
— it happens, like a natural phenomenon, unrepeatable and
inevitable.
Red, a constant presence throughout her trajectory, pulses
as the vital center of her work.
It is not color; it is temperature. It is the blood of creation,
the heat of the moment, the vibration that sustains the
invisible.
This red does not represent — it radiates. It expands beyond
form and reaches the viewer’s body, provoking sensation
before thought.
The Freedom of Gesture
In Dani Fontenelle’s art, paint is not obedient — it is alive. It
chooses its own path, flows, meets itself, and transforms into
thought.
Red
It is color and it is rhythm.
It is blood in motion, a flower opening,
a fire that asks no permission.
To paint with red is to touch the territory
of origin — and, at the same time, that of
revolution.
In the history of art, red has always been
ambiguous: the color of power and
danger, of passion and punishment.
But in feminine hands, its meaning shifts.
In the woman who creates, red ceases to
be a threat and becomes an assertion. It
is not the tone of scandal, but of
presence — a reminder that to exist is an
act of continuous strength.
Red is the color of fertility — but not only biological fertility.
It is the fertility of thought, of emotion, of creation. It is the color
of women who invent languages, who turn paint into a territory
where they can exist fully. In every layer of this color there is a
pulse. In every stain, a memory of what it means to be born, to
lose, to begin again. Red carries within it the complete cycle:
pain, pleasure, and possibility.
In painting, it is a living force — never neutral, never restrained.
When an artist plunges into red, she plunges into herself. Red is
the territory of women who create worlds: who make paint, word,
or gesture the place where they can exist fully. In every layer of
this color there is an inner rhythm, a reminder that living is
flowing between beginnings and new beginnings.
When an artist chooses red, she is not merely adding color —
she is connecting with what is most vital within herself. Red is
the invisible thread between body and cosmos, between
gesture and feeling, between action and meaning. It is the color
that makes visible what the heart feels before the mind
understands.
In the end, red is the tone of rebirth. With each new layer, it burns
and heals, destroys and remakes. It is the color that marks the
moment when the old dissolves and the new dares to be born.
Because red, in its essence, belongs neither to fire nor to blood
— it belongs to what makes everything exist: the courage to feel
deeply and to keep creating.
The Artist
Dani Fontenelle’s painting does not begin with a drawing or a desire for
control.
It happens — like water finding its way through, like a moment that spills
out without asking permission. The paint runs, time takes part, and the
gesture, instead of commanding, follows. In this space between chance
and intention, the artist turns the invisible into presence, and color into
thought.
Self-taught and multifaceted, born in Recife and based in Brasília for
decades, Dani learned to make art a territory of absolute freedom. Her
background in law and business shaped an analytical mind, but it was
through painting that she discovered the alchemy between reason and
instinct, discipline and surrender. The studio became the place where the
outside world falls silent and matter begins to speak — where error is no
longer a deviation, but a language.
In her technique, liquid becomes thought in motion. Acrylic paint, dense
or translucent, is guided by gravity, time, and intuition. Each work is an
unrepeatable experience: the heat of the day, the density of the pigment,
the gesture of the moment — everything interferes, and everything
matters. The result is always organic, vibrant, unpredictable. As if each
painting had chosen to be born in its own way.
In Dani Fontenelle’s work, there is
a subtle tension — a constant
dialogue between guidance and
surrender. Between the gesture
that
directs
and
the
material
that insists on following its own
course,
a
territory
emerges
where the unexpected becomes
language. Her paintings do not
seek to reproduce reality, but to
reinvent it. The viewer does not
observe from a distance — they
are drawn in. There is a quiet
vibration
within
the
work,
an
energy
that
reaches
the
eye
before it is fully understood.
Each piece is a pause in time, a
space where color and fluidity
blur
into
one
another.
What
moves across the canvas is not
paint, but life in motion, searching
for a form that does not yet
exist,
yet
already
announces
itself.
THERE ARE MOMENTS IN
ART HISTORY WHEN
MATTER ITSELF SEEMS TO
CLAIM THE RIGHT TO
CREATE.
It was this way in 1936, when David Alfaro Siqueiros, in his experimental
studio in Mexico City, began pouring paint onto metal sheets and
observing what happened. The artist was not simply searching for new
forms — he was investigating the physical behavior of paint, the
interaction between densities, the speed at which pigment spread and
found its own paths. In that inaugural gesture, something essential was
discovered: painting could happen without obedience.
Years later, Jackson Pollock would turn this experiment into language. By
abandoning the brush and allowing gravity and the movement of the
body to define the mark, Pollock ushered in a new relationship between
artist and artwork — one of partnership and risk, where control gives way
to intuition. The act of pouring became a symbol of freedom: the moment
when the artist stops “making” and allows art to happen.
C r e a t e y o u r
p r o f e s s i o n a l
p o r t f o l i o
@ r e a l l y g r e a t s i t e
“ A r t t a u g h t m e t h a t b e a u t y
d o e s n ’ t i m p o s e i t s e l f — i t a l l o w s
i t s e l f t o h a p p e n . ”
D a n i F o n t e n e l l e
C r e a t e y o u r
p r o f e s s i o n a l
p o r t f o l i o
@ r e a l l y g r e a t s i t e
But the story of pouring does not belong
only to the past. In contemporary times,
artists like Dani Fontenelle reframe this
legacy, bringing to the flow a distinctly
feminine sensibility — one that leans more
toward listening than imposing. In her
work, the act of pouring is not an
accident; it is a method. It is not a loss of
control,
but
an
alliance
with
the
unpredictable. Paint, free to move, meets
gravity, time, and temperature — and in
the convergence of these forces, the
artist recognizes the birth of something
that goes beyond intention.
Fluid painting is, above all, an exercise in trust. It
requires the artist to let go of certainty and to
understand
that
beauty
can
emerge
from
the
unexpected. It is a territory where creation unfolds in
dialogue with physics, chemistry, and chance — where
the human gesture blends with the natural rhythm of
things.
When paint runs, it thinks. When pigment spreads, it
breathes. And when the artist observes, without trying
to dominate, a timeless truth is revealed: art is not
merely an action upon matter — it is a conversation
with it.
Dani’s works are not born from a desire for control, but
from a relationship of complicity with the material. In
the act of pouring, she discovers the precise point
where intention gives way to flow — where technique
and instinct intertwine, and the gesture becomes pure
presence. It is on this delicate threshold, where paint
seems to act of its own will, that her art reveals what
escapes logic: the beauty of what arises without
command, yet with meaning.
“Pouring is my way of saying that the unpredictable also
has its own delicacy.“ Dani Fontenelle
In Dani Fontenelle’s painting, paint is not
a tool — it is an event. Nothing is
imposed, nothing is foreseen. Color finds
its own path, guided by gravity, time, and
a kind of silent wisdom that lives within
matter. The artist’s gesture does not seek
control; it seeks coexistence. She does
not direct the pouring — she simply allows
it. It is in this act of surrender that blue
reveals itself. Not as a color, but as a
state. The blue in her canvases does not
cover the surface; it moves through it. It
spreads with the serenity of something
that knows its own depth. It flows like
liquid memory, as if each layer were a
thought dissolving.
Within this blue, there is the same vibration as
silence — that moment when everything is about
to move, yet still pauses to breathe before the
gesture. While red radiates pulse, presence,
and inner fire, Dani’s blue is born from the
interval — from the space where the eye rests
and the spirit expands. It is a blue that does
not freeze; it vibrates in subtleties, breathes
through transparency, and suggests more than
it reveals. Between densities and light veils, the
pigment creates depths that seem to reflect
the infinite. Her canvases do not depict seas or
skies — they evoke states of the soul.
01.
02.
A gesture that suspends time
and gives paint back its right to
be living matter.
Here, chance is not an accident;
it is participation.
Each layer results from the meeting of
intention and nature, intuition and
physics — and it is within this fusion that
art becomes an event shared between
the human and the elemental.
Inspired by Oscar Niemeyer’s Cathedral of Brasília, this
work transforms the monument into presence.
Structure ceases to be architecture and becomes
gesture — a suggestion of form that seems to arise
from light itself. Blue and white meet like sky and
concrete, creating a luminous field in which the viewer
completes what the artist only hints at.
In her process, gravity replaces the brush and flow
defines the contour. Blue — at times deep, at times
diaphanous — oscillates between lightness and
density, making light itself seem to have substance.
White acts as a pause, an interval that allows color to
expand unhurriedly, as if each transparency were also
a breath of time.
The Cathedral that emerges from this painting does
not belong to physical space, but to perception. It is an
image that forms and dissolves, like a reflection on
moving water.
What Dani proposes is not veneration, but
contemplation: a moment in which form and silence
find balance. In this work, the sacred is translated into
harmony — the point where gesture meets lightness
and color becomes light.
“Blue teaches me that serenity also
has movement.”
Dani Fontenelle