The solo exhibition Reforesting: When I Allow Myself to Bloom by Efe Godoy at the Piccola Galleria of Casa Fiat de Cultura brings together watercolors created from vintage photographs, on view from June 2 to July 19, 2026.
Featuring 61 paintings, Efe Godoy draws from found and fragmented photographs to construct images in which faces merge with flowers, leaves, roots, and imagined plant species. The works emerge from a manual process of tearing and reconstruction, through which the artist transforms images interrupted by time into new compositions. What once served as documentation comes to exist within the territory of memory and imagination.
Watercolor plays a central role in the artist's practice. The accumulation of water and the layering of color produce images in constant transformation. By bringing together the fluidity of watercolor with the abrupt cuts of torn photographs, Efe creates relationships between continuity and rupture. Flowers and plants cease to function merely as decorative elements and instead become integrated into the depicted bodies, forming hybrid figures. “I really enjoy the encounter between watercolor and torn photography because neither ever fully controls the other. It is from that balance that the works begin to emerge,” the artist explains.
The relationship between painting and photography also extends into the exhibition space. For the exhibition, Efe Godoy created a site-specific intervention directly on the walls of the Piccola Galleria, transforming the gallery into a vast pictorial surface. “I wanted the entire gallery to feel like a garden of memories. That's why I also painted the walls, as if the works continued to grow throughout the space,” she says. Inspired by organic and botanical patterns, the mural unfolds throughout the gallery like wallpaper created by the artist herself, enhancing the sense of immersion and continuity between the works and the exhibition space. Visitors move through the exhibition as though traversing a garden composed of images, memories, and layers of color.
