ArtRio: What blooms on the way

Every image begins with a path traveled. Giulia Mangoni and Ian Salamente arrive at painting by opposite 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 the real, how they distort it, and how, ultimately, they reinvent it. For both, to paint is to cross: a movement of walking, of wandering, of coming home. Born in Isola del Liri, Italy, Mangoni has roots in Rio de Janeiro — her mother’s city, where she spent much of her childhood before moving permanently to Italy. Bloom is born precisely from this return: conceived and produced in Rio for ArtRio 2026, the project begins with the observation of Brazilian flora — a botany that is, above all, a territory of nostalgia, the matter of an affective memory the artist rediscovers through drawing. Her practice, long anchored in an ethics of return and in the re-reading of the relationships between identity, geography, and decentralized communities, finds here its most precise form. The series stages the metamorphosis of flora: it advances from the naturalistic study, still faithful to the flower’s morphology, to the fantastical study, where any bond with the observable world breaks and mythological figures and archetypal apparitions emerge. The flower ceases to be the subject of representation and becomes the origin of an ever-expanding imaginative flowering — and botany, a visual grammar for thinking about how an image is constructed. Salamente also returns. He goes back to Cabo Frio, his hometown where he lived his childhood and which continues to generate feeling in his work, and to the specific ground of the salt flats and 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 makes popular visual culture the material of a painting that reads the ordinary and converts it into belonging. Displaced from their religious function into a social and collective dimension, these carpets trace paths of salt that transform the street into a place of encounter — built now alongside friends and family, in a gesture as infinite as the salt slipping through one’s hands. Bare feet, local football shirts, and flares compose the vocabulary through which he articulates the city’s contrasts. What unites the two practices is childhood understood as a common ground of creation: that time when matter, space, people, and nature had not yet been separated into categories, and when a flower, a handful of salt, or a street could be, simultaneously, world and invention. It is to this territory that both return — Mangoni to Rio de Janeiro, her heartland; Salamente to Cabo Frio, his native ground — not to reconstruct a memory, but to reactivate a way of seeing. Between Mangoni’s vertical flowering, which rises from observation to mythology, and Salamente’s horizontal paths, which extend across the floor of the city, ArtRio brings together two practices that share a single conviction: that to observe is already to translate, and that every image rooted in a place carries within it the power to become world. From a flower that dissolves into myth to a handful of salt that remakes the street into common ground, both artists remind us that going home is, above all, a way of reinventing it.