Daniel Malva is a Brazilian artist whose work aims to illustrate our inability to see and feel natural world around us, particularly in his best-known series, Natural History Museum, created in 2009. Through his work, in his own words, Malva tries to “bring some poetic questions to the pieces”, as they examine “questions surrounding our humanity, and how we perceive nature.” Today, his new work is shifting from biology to science, specifically into the realm of generative art (using digital tools to generate an image).
Working with Brazilian researcher and visual artist Sergio Venancio, Malva uses a computer programme to ‘draw’: it processes a sequence of photographs to create a unique digital drawing. To create these sequences, Malva has been working with maths and statistics, inspired by, among others, the works of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, the English mathematician George Boole, and artists such as Timo Nasseri and Jenny Saville.
Here, we highlight a particular set of photographs from the Natural History Museum series. To create them, Malva worked with unique photographic techniques which allowed him to simultaneously both obscure and highlight a subject. These butterflies and insects belong to the Coffee Museum in Ribeirão Preto a city in the state of São Paulo. These particular pieces have notable relevance to the coffee production in Brazil as some insects combat pests which attack the plantations and are also of immense importance in the pollination process. “When I was a child, my grandparents lived on a small farm. My father and grandfather taught me to respect all animals, including insects. Since then, I have always loved spiders, beetles and butterflies. I’ve never understood the repugnant way we deal with animals,” explains Malva.
Here are some of his favourite pieces.
Lead image: Papilionoidea#4, from the Natural History Museum series, 2009, digital archive on Giclée on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm, 39×26 cm.
Images courtesy of Daniel Malva