Elena Ceretti Stein: Sunburn

The second solo exhibition of Elena Ceretti Stein at Braverman Gallery, “Sunburn”, explores the delicate relationships between humanity, nature, and global ecology. Through paintings on wood and canvas alongside a video work, Ceretti Stein creates a visual world moving between mythology, science, and memory. The exhibition focuses on connections: invasive species, endangered plants, and processes of transformation and metamorphosis, using imagery drawn from Renaissance art and iconography. Her works examine how tourism, trade, and human consumption reshape entire ecosystems, offering a poetic and meditative reflection on beauty, interdependence, and perpetual balance.

Each painting in the exhibition is dedicated to this fragile and beautiful equilibrium, in which the local and the imported continue to transform one another endlessly, though not without consequences. Ceretti Stein asks what it means to be “invasive,” proposing that we think about the world through the concept of allostasis – stability through change, rather than through fixed notions of homeostasis and stable equilibrium.

Within this world, humanity does not stand outside nature but functions as part of it. The works address not only the fragility of balance, but also human responsibility toward the living systems and the diversity we continue to shape, damage and alter. Every act of consumption, importation, or resource exploitation generates a chain reaction far broader than what is visible to the eye.

The exhibition offers a slow, almost meditative perspective on the ways life, change, beauty, and renewal coexist simultaneously. In Ceretti Stein’s world, mythology and biology function as complementary languages. Light, darkness, growth, and consumption flow through the works as different states of the same body.

This is a world in which there is no longer a clear boundary between the human and the nonhuman, the sacred and the earthly, the past and the future. What remains is the recognition of the invisible connections linking all forms of life, and the daintiness of the balances that sustain them.