André Griffo, “O vendedor de miniaturas 8″ (The Vendor of Miniature Figures 8), 2024, acrylic paint and oil paint on canvas, 69.7” x 92.5″/Photo: Nara Roesler New York

There is a surprising quality in the paintings by André Griffo, currently on view at Nara Roesler Gallery in New York, that feels unfathomably real. For his first solo show in the United States, the artist continues with painting factual and fictional rooms, inspired by his architectural background, and depicts them with utmost detail. Titled “Exploded View,” Griffo is able to capture the structure of places quite theatrically in his exhibition, as if churches and train stations were the stage and we are walking into a portal of his own making.

“The Vendor of Miniature Figures 8” (2024) is a portrait of a man selling trinkets in a train station. The light-blue checkered walls with posters hanging and graffiti are painted with such detail that one might mistake it for a photograph. Charles Davidson, director of Nara Roesler in New York, tells me that “train stations are egalitarian spaces.” In the painting, I suddenly notice that the parts that depicts the stairs to the outside are pristine and clean while the blue walls covered in posters and graffiti feel dirty. It feels like a class divide between those who are able to travel in and out of the train station into their own worlds of wealth, while the man selling trinkets is stuck sitting and selling these figurines. Griffo has also created his own figurines next to the painting, paralleling what he so often sees in the trains in Rio de Janeiro. In the artist’s iteration, they are, as the press release notes, reminiscent of slaves who work tirelessly: “slaves had to adapt aspects of their original beliefs to their reality in Brazil, and began to use local plants as proxies, using them as a means of representing their deities.” I began to see the figurines as deities for martyrs.

André Griffo, “80s,” 2024, acrylic and oil on canvas, 69.7″ x 52.4″/Photo: Nara Roesler New York

The church is another frequently painted space for André Griffo, and another egalitarian space. In his paintings of churches, there aren’t people portrayed as there are in the train-station paintings. The structure of the churches and the architecture give an impression of holiness with altars and facades, odes to Portuguese blue tiles, nods to the church as a sanctuary for all those searching for answers. The silence feels loud in the paintings of empty rooms. And yet, suddenly, in the midst of his precise depiction of a church, there is something odd. In “Jesus and His Theocratic Project for the 2000s VII (Constantino’s Sleep)” (2024), for instance, what appears to be hundreds of miniature naked people are crawling out of the wooden floorboards and seizing, almost occupying, the floor beneath an altar of Jesus. In “Suppression of the Saint by Ornament IV” (2024), a doll is positioned as baby Jesus would when being held by Mary, except Griffo’s depiction of the doll has no legs. He shows this strange surrealism to allude to, perhaps, the reality of the church and how it is not always inclusive and egalitarian. In the painting “80s” (2024), the artist portrays his brother inside the bathroom of the LGBT Center in New York. On the wall of the painting is a work that Keith Haring made in 1989. The press release explains, “Haring’s painting coincides with when the artist’s brother left his hometown of Barra Mansa and migrated to the United States to be able to live his sexuality freely.”

In a recent interview in Asymptote Journal, Griffo explained that the main subject of his artistic practice was religion and how it had been “used as a tool of control throughout history.” He told the magazine: “My first artistic experience occurred while I was studying the retrofit of vacant buildings in Rio de Janeiro. The emptiness of those ruined spaces made me think beyond the architect’s role of designing, constructing and occupying.” At Nara Roesler, André Griffo’s paintings stand as landmarks to further contemplate the spaces we visit and inhabit. The emptiness of the rooms is an invitation, an open door, to inclusivity.

“André Griffo: Exploded View” is on view at Nara Roesler New York, 511 West 21st Street, New York, through December 21.