Every image begins with a journey taken. Giulia Mangoni and Ian Salamente arrive at painting by opposing routes, yet driven by the same gesture: returning to a place of origin and, from there, investigating the very nature of images — what they retain of reality, how they distort it, and how they ultimately reinvent it. For both artists, painting is a form of passage: a movement of walking, traversing, and returning home.
Born in Isola del Liri, Italy, Mangoni has roots in Rio de Janeiro, her mother’s hometown, where she spent much of her childhood before moving permanently to Italy. Bloom emerges precisely from this return. Conceived and produced in Rio for ArtRio 2026, the project stems from an observation of Brazilian flora — a botanical world that is, above all, a landscape of nostalgia, the substance of an emotional memory that the artist rediscovers through drawing. Her practice, long grounded in an ethos of return and in a reexamination of the relationships between identity, geography, and decentralized communities, finds its most precise expression here.
The series stages the metamorphosis of flora: it moves from naturalistic studies, still faithful to the morphology of flowers, to fantastical studies, in which every connection to the observable world dissolves and mythological figures and archetypal apparitions emerge. The flower ceases to be the subject of representation and becomes the source of an ever-expanding imaginative blossoming — while botany becomes a visual grammar through which to consider how an image is constructed.
Salamente, too, returns. He goes back to Cabo Frio, his hometown, where he spent his childhood and which continues to inspire deep affection in his work, and to the specific landscape of its salt flats and the salt carpets laid out along Avenida do Contorno for the Corpus Christi procession. Faithful to the idea that “the museum is the world; it is everyday experience,” the artist draws on popular visual culture to create paintings that interpret the ordinary and transform it into a sense of belonging.
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