There’s something haunting and hymn-like in Gleeson Paulino’s work — like the memory of a dream slipping through your fingers at dawn. In Echoes of the Amazon, his recent exhibition at Galerie Gomis in Paris, the Brazilian photographer invites us into a world where the forest breathes, gazes linger, and identity isn’t just captured — it’s chanted.

Paulino, originally from a small town in southern Brazil, has built a body of work shaped by his country’s layered realities — both brutal and breathtaking. His photography is deeply sensorial, often fusing documentary with surrealism, fashion with folklore, the spiritual with the political. But in Echoes of the Amazon, he pushes that instinct even further, presenting the rainforest not only as a site of ecological urgency but also as a keeper of ancestral memory.

Shot over multiple trips through the Brazilian Amazon, the series departs from the typical gaze often turned toward the region. These aren’t sweeping aerials or exoticized portraits. Instead, Paulino’s lens lingers with intimacy and reverence. Figures — often adorned in organic materials, feathers, body paint — emerge from the shadows of trees or water as if summoned. There’s an earthy elegance to their posture, a deliberate stillness. They’re collaborators more than subjects, offering themselves as living conduits of myth and resistance.

In interviews, Paulino speaks about Echoes as a love letter to the forest and its people — but also a call to listen more deeply. “The forest speaks,” he says in Aesthetica, “but often in ways we’ve forgotten how to hear.” That philosophy carries through every image. There’s a photograph of a young boy submerged in river water, his gaze breaking the surface; another of an elder whose face is painted with lines that echo both ritual and river currents. These are moments between silence and song, where identity becomes fluid — gender, geography, time all melting into one humid breath.

The exhibition space itself mirrored that fluidity. Galerie Gomis transformed its interiors into a multisensory environment — dimmed light, rainforest soundscapes, and a subtle scent of wet earth. You weren’t just looking at photographs — you were stepping inside them.

What also makes Paulino’s approach stand out is his refusal to over-explain. He doesn’t reduce these moments to hashtags or headlines. He trusts the image. He trusts that viewers — if they’re willing — will stay long enough for something to echo back.

At a time when the Amazon is both literal battleground and symbolic frontier, Echoes of the Amazon doesn’t shout. It listens. It remembers. It sings softly into the noise, offering visions that are as much about presence as they are about preservation.

For those of us tuning in from elsewhere — city-bound, screen-tethered — Paulino’s work feels like a threshold. Not just a window into a disappearing world, but an invitation to ask: What part of ourselves have we silenced? What wilderness, inside or out, are we still capable of hearing?