Ca’ del Duca 3052, Corte del Duca Sforza
San Marco, 30124 Venezia, Italy
Mon – Sat 10am – 7pm
“Artistically and personally I learnt the need to exercise more patience with myself and my work, the more time you give a painting, the better it becomes.”
The solo show Enciclope_dia, is the output of Rodrigo Mabunda’s residency in 2019 in Venice.
Rodrigo Mabunda’s immersion in the millennial history of Venice immediately draws attention to the endless possibilities of any work of art, and to art practices outside of Western-sanctioned aesthetics. The frenzied rhythm of the overcrowded Venice, experienced before the coronavirus lockdown, its exceptional tide peaks and its breathtaking majesty have deeply dazzled the young Mozambican artist throughout his first Venetian residence.
The series Enciclope_dia perceived in its 15 works created on the boxes from Enciclopedia Universale dell’Arte convey a boundless stream of consciousness. Movement, transition, and transfiguration of the Venetian landscape emerge spontaneously through the artwork by diving into its everyday life.
As a narrator who experienced and practised between two different cultures, his works firmly investigate the intersections of the self and the other. In his impressive drawings, the oneiric interweave between bodies, gondolas, historic paintings and local monuments claim the fulfilment of intent beyond the materiality of the image.
Mabunda underlines the enormous fluidities of the notions of location and identity, two imperatives of existence in our age. Nowadays, to survive is to be on constant move, to engage in a continuous shift, to recognize, and acknowledge, the underlying fluidity in the nature of things.