Dani Fontenelle doesn’t paint what she sees—or even what she imagines. She
paints what spills. What can’t be contained. What overflows from the moment,
from emotion, from the material itself. Her work doesn’t come from a plan, but
from a plunge—into the unpredictable, the gesture, the meeting of color and
gravity.
Born in Recife, Pernambuco, and living in Brasília for the past five decades, Dani is
a lawyer, administrator, and self-taught visual artist. This mix of paths isn’t a
coincidence—it’s the reflection of a restless, curious mind, deeply attuned to a
beauty that doesn’t scream—but pulses. Her studio, built in the midst of everyday
life and a deep listening to the world, has become both sanctuary and stage.
There, she learned to make art a space of absolute freedom.
In painting, she found a language that welcomes risk and embraces mistakes as
part of the process. Her technique is an alchemy of control and surrender: she
works with liquid and acrylic paints, guided not by a desire to dominate, but by the
acceptance of what emerges when matter meets time. Each canvas is one of a
kind, shaped by unrepeatable conditions—density, temperature, intuition, silence.
Dani primarily explores fluid painting. Her compositions—organic and dreamlike—
seem to arise from an inner cosmos. They are landscapes of energy, shapes in
transition, structures floating between the abstract and the natural. In them, color
and movement form a visual language that needs no words: they say through
stains what words cannot. These are emotional maps of something yet to come—
or maybe something long gone, that left traces on the heart.
Her love for the universe and nature doesn’t manifest through literal
representation, but through the energy she breathes into her paintings. Dani
seems to feel the same forces of expansion and flow that move stars and rivers,
and she translates them into colors and forms that resonate with that vastness. It’s
the artist’s soul in dialogue with the grand systems of the world.