
GABRIEL PESSAGNO

Born in Campinas, Gabriel Pessagno has a Visual Arts bachelor's degree from the ‘Pontifícia Universidade Católica – PUC Campinas', and has completed courses such as Fashion Design at the ‘Istituto Maragoni Milano’, High Fashion Embroidery at the ‘École Lesage Paris’, and Bench Jewelry at the ‘Atelier Flávio Franco.
After working in the fashion industry, Gabriel realized that his true interest was in manual making and techniques used to weave the pieces. This perception instigated him to migrate to the world of visual arts in which he reached the freedom he longed for.
His artistic research comes from his perception of São Paulo and its historic, and hereditary, situation. Drawing from paintings and vintage photographs, the artist connects current social archetypes with the ones of the past, emphasizing and criticizing recurrent social problematics through his embroideries, an ancestral technique with which, through documental narratives, he aims to talk about the traditions and trajectories ignored by various communities.
In Gabriel Pessagno’s works, the figures become anonymous through their missing faces, becoming icons of the connection between these historic periods that the artist wishes to represent. His intention is to instigate the intimate connection we have with the unresolved past, from customs to beliefs that remains, and our inability to deal with those, highlighting the fact that we aren’t that different from our ancestors.
The artist gets inspiration from classic references such as Debret’s and Rugendas’s paintings of the colonial era, but mostly from the way Carlos Julião’s used a plain background with no landscape interference. Gabriel is also inspired by Princess Isabel’s photography archive from the 19th century, bringing contemporaneity to these references through his precise, and extremely well executed, technique.