Gervane de Paula creates his artwork with a strong graphic character across multiple platforms, such as paintings, drawings, photography, installations, and objects. His work carries a potent ecological appeal, alternating between melancholic tones and a powerful denunciatory charge. His festive scenes from his neighborhood in Cuiabá, for example, complement the specific reality of the Brazilian cerrado, while also vehemently addressing the socio-environmental disasters caused by large-scale agribusiness, unregulated mining, and their inextricable legacies of violence. The artist draws from and operates within an aesthetic shaped by images of mass consumption and the use of everyday materials from the Brazilian Midwest, alongside assertive references to art history. A member of the Geração 80, De Paula stood alongside artists such as Leonilson, Leda Catunda, Beatriz Milhazes, and Luiz Zerbini in advocating for vibrant and provocative painting, in contrast to the hyper-intellectualism of Brazilian conceptual art in the 1970s.

In his works, De Paula creates pseudo-fictional narratives depicting the hostility of large landowners and defenders of unchecked agribusiness when confronted with the critical questioning of art. Seeing his works as political and environmental denunciations that would prevent them from continuing their illicit activities, these figures retaliate with brutal force, using the privileges of their power. De Paula, understanding art as a trap, often depicts shotguns, dead artists, rivers of blood, and plaques that honor political and environmental activists, courageously persisting in the denunciatory and critical powers of the artist figure.

Beyond environmental crimes, such as large-scale deforestation, pollution, and the extinction of numerous species of fauna and flora, De Paula also addresses the social crime caused by the dynamics of agribusiness, drug trafficking on the border between Mato Grosso and Bolivia, structural racism, police authoritarianism, and political corruption. At times, with sarcasm, he even transposes certain power dynamics and hostilities into the relationships within the art market itself. The artist has always been a victim of geographical isolation: living in Cuiabá, far from the Brazilian Southeast axis where the hegemonic market agents and art critics operate, his career, spanning over four decades, was long invisible and underestimated. Nevertheless, his production has remained relentless and poignant, never faltering.