The Exhibition: O Canto do Rio by Antonio Kuschnir
by Barbara Magliocco
There exists a place where the improbable and the impossible coexist. A space where matter brushes against dreams and reinvents itself from within. Antonio Kuschnir’s painting precisely inhabits this boundary, a transitional zone between the real and the imaginary, where details amplify and the pictorial narrative emerges as the guiding element of the gesture.
Kuschnir’s love for painting is visible, ardent, almost ritualistic. His practice is simultaneously a visual diary and a tool for self-discovery, a vital process that has accompanied him since childhood. Life and work intertwine, one extending into the other, in a dance in which the body merges with the gesture.
Antonio embarks on a painterly traversal that is deeply allegorical and meta-linguistic, where imaginary scenarios and historical figures intertwine in the delicate and unstable fabric between the new and the ancient. In O Canto do Rio, Kuschnir proposes a visual archaeology not only of the image, but of the pictorial subject itself, which constructs and dissolves itself at the symbolic margins of the canvas. Contemplating his works, we find ourselves immersed in an indeterminate territory where bodies and landscapes occupy fluid boundaries between dream, delirium, and allegorical fable. His figures do not derive from objective reality, but from a profound symbolic reinvention of the self, a self that fragments and re-invents itself through hybrid characters, metamorphoses, and ever-shifting masks.
The exhibition’s title, O Canto do Rio, originates from a work featured in the show and carries significant polysemy. “Canto” refers, on one hand, to the act of singing, a lyrical expression, a voice that rises to narrate, evoke, traverse the sensory. On the other hand, it refers to “corner,” a precise, intimate space, the edge of a house, the curve of a landscape, a place for gathering and belonging. In this dual sense, the title becomes a poetic and spatial device, the subject that sings, and simultaneously the symbolic geography in which that song resonates. It is within this interplay of voice and territory, between language and rootedness, that Antonio Kuschnir’s painterly work is situated. Each artwork presents itself as a fragment of a visual score, a stanza of a broader song. His figures, human, animal, monstrous, or mythological, are archetypes of a multifaceted self constantly in mutation. His work with symbols, dreams, playful imagery, and a fertile, wild imagination forms the backbone of his artistic process.
Rio de Janeiro, the artist’s birthplace, is not only the landscape of origin, but an affective and symbolic geography. From there, Kuschnir draws conscious and unconscious images, mountains that watch, trees that whisper, birds that narrate. This exuberant, sensory, and often contradictory universe shapes his gaze and populates his painting like a daily mythology.
The exhibition, presented by ABC‑ARTE in Genoa, unfolds in four rooms and represents the artist’s most extensive solo show to date. In each space, the visitor is invited to cross visual portals revealing creatures, forests, specters, silences, and deliriums. The unconscious emerges as a symbolic matrix, as Jung asserted, the sea monsters emerging from these waters might be projections of our own shadows.
At the entrance, two paintings open the narrative, I dreamed a song of us and This way (my way). The latter, begun on the artist’s birthday during his 2025 residency in France, is also the first work created for the exhibition. It embodies a painterly method that Kuschnir has recently developed, starting with few elements and then reworking, layering, rewriting. This is an open, evolving process that welcomes new meanings at every stage.
In the second room we find Aurora, the second-largest painting in the exhibition, which the artist considers his grand finale. Created in Bonn, Germany, this piece recalls earlier themes and symbols, the serpent, the bird, the turtle, the armors, which resurface as visual echoes. In the background, the artist’s self-portrait establishes a connection with This way, generating a circular narrative. But Aurora is not only an iconographic node in the exhibition, it is also a scenic device, a stage for symbolic, compositional, and performative tension. Kuschnir constructs the image as though it were an open theater, in which each figure is both actor and spectator. The gazes, often directed frontally toward the viewer, break the fourth wall and create a disturbing effect, the painting looks at the visitor, calls them into question, includes them in the visual drama. In this sense, Aurora aligns with Velázquez’s Las Meninas, not only for its Baroque structure, but for its meta-pictorial awareness of the act of painting itself.
The work thus becomes spectacle, mise-en-scène, a scenic construction where planes overlap like theatrical wings, the background dialogues with the foreground, characters with the author, fiction with intimacy. The armors and masks become costumes, the animals, totemic presences, the poses, dramatic gestures frozen in an immobile time. The artist places himself at the heart of the composition, not as an omniscient narrator, but as a vulnerable body immersed in the narrative. In Aurora, theatre is not merely evoked, it is embodied in the structure of the image and in the tension it constructs with the viewer.
This pervasive theatricality permeates the other works in the exhibition as well, but finds in Aurora a powerful synthesis, where painting becomes action, stage presence, and reflection on its own nature. Kuschnir paints as if setting up a ritual, where each figure is called to bear witness, and each viewer, to participate.
In the same room is A Barriga da Terra, conceived in dialogue with O Canto do Rio. Both works stage a tension between pacification and conflict, quiet characters coexist with symbols of violence, swords, armors, fantastic creatures. A dragon tied by a delicate ribbon symbolizes this dialectic between strength and vulnerability, evoking the surrealist aesthetic where the impossible becomes possible.
The third room, the largest in the exhibition route, hosts twelve works of various formats and develops one of the exhibition’s most intense thematic lines, the narration of creatures. The Creatures I, II, III series brings these figures to the foreground, raising them to absolute protagonism. They are not “monsters” in the traditional, disparaging sense of the term, but entities that inhabit the margins of the visible and the sayable, hybrid, ambiguous creatures that challenge any moral classification. They are neither good nor bad, but carriers of what escapes rational control, figures of excess, desire, creative chaos.
For Kuschnir, these presences are not threats, but possibilities. They are emanations of the unconscious, incarnations of mystery, dream, the untameable. They represent the part of us that resists normalization, that refuses the linearity of logical thought, and claims the right to metamorphosis. The artist grants them symbolic autonomy and iconographic dignity, they exist and persist in the pictorial world not as simple allegories, but as vital forces, agents of transformation.
In these canvases, Kuschnir does not thematize fear of the monstrous, but its necessity, that which disturbs us also reveals us. The creatures become, thus, deforming and sincere mirrors of our plural self. They are figures of otherness, but also of the deepest intimacy. In them resides a non‑linear, poetic, and visionary form of knowledge that runs through the entire exhibition as a visual counterpoint.
The climax of the exhibition is Venus (after Manet and Titian), a monumental work that establishes a tight dialogue with Manet’s Olympia, itself an echo of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, yet breaks with every canon to assert a radically personal voice. In this composition, Kuschnir portrays himself nude, vulnerable, exposed not only to the gaze of the other, but also to the more ruthless gaze of himself. Around him there are no maidens nor decorative objects, but disturbing presences, interior creatures dwelling in the folds of the unconscious, ambiguous figures revealing that which consciousness tries in vain to repress.
Here the body offers itself as an unfinished sculpture, like in Michelangelo’s Prisons, where the soul seems to struggle to free itself from matter. Kuschnir does not simply quote tradition, he dismantles it, reinvents it, makes it explode into new expressive possibilities. The structure is classical, but the scene is suffused with a contemporary unease, a telluric energy that subverts every balance.
In Venus, the viewer’s gaze is captured, almost trapped, within a system of visual and symbolic references. Every detail is laden with emotional tension, the skin, the eyes, the shadows. It is a painting that demands to be traversed, not merely seen. Here painting does not illustrate, it interrogates, destabilizes, possesses. It is an invitation to strip away our own masks, as the artist does, and to linger for a moment in that fragile and immensely potent space where beauty meets the unsettling.
Also in this room is O Canto do Rio, the work that gives the exhibition its title and represents its most potent visual synthesis. A stream of water cuts the composition vertically, like a symbolic river that divides and yet connects different worlds. On its sides, Renaissance knights face each other in a theatrical and solemn scene, armed with swords and armor, evoking an epic iconography spanning centuries of European historical painting.
But the balance is shaken by unexpected presences, among the figures appears a wild tiger, painted with dense and vibrant brushwork, that explicitly recalls Antonio Ligabue’s primordial creatures, symbols of instinctive force, of the wild erupting into human order. The entire scene is immersed in lush, tropical vegetation, which confounds geographical coordinates and transforms the pictorial space into an archetypal jungle. In O Canto do Rio, Kuschnir builds a visual palimpsest, each figure is a sign, each animal a threshold, each plant an echo. The scene presents itself as a psychic fresco, a map of forces in tension, inviting the viewer to lose themselves and find themselves again within the meanders of a timeless narrative.
To close the journey, The Gift (I Give You My Love) presents itself as an offering. A female figure offers a branch of leaves, a symbolic gift, an affectionate farewell. The embroidery, the meticulous details of the garment, all invite a sensitive and attentive viewing.
Kuschnir’s painting does not demand immediate understanding, but openness. Every canvas is an invitation to belong, to lose oneself, to reinvent oneself within a potential fantasy. The audience is free to traverse symbols and signs, to wander through images and construct their own narrative. Here there is a poetic resonance with Manoel de Barros, the Brazilian poet, in his ability to merge the everyday and the mythical, the minimalist and the essential, reinventing reality through the power of imagination. His phrase, “All that I do not invent is false”, seems to echo in each of Kuschnir’s works, where the visible world is the one we have the courage to dream.
O Canto do Rio is an expanded space of fable, where painting becomes an ontological gesture. Antonio Kuschnir reminds us that the image does not simply reflect what is, but can recreate what does not yet exist. To traverse his works means to cross myths, archetypes, memories, and deliriums, and perhaps, along that path, to rediscover a part of ourselves.Antonio Kuschnir: The River, the Myth, and the Mirror
by Pedro Scudeller
1. Reflexes of the Source, Automythology
It’s difficult to know, at first glance, where the figures inhabiting Antonio Kuschnir’s painting come from. They appear, often, as hybrid characters, creatures in transit, in metamorphosis, suspended in an ambiguous space between the tropical and the oneiric, between intimate memory and visual fabulation. But this difficulty of origin, this impossibility of precisely determining a source or genre for his images, is not a problem to be solved, it is, on the contrary, the very raw material of his work. Kuschnir’s painting does not represent, it reinvents. It reinvents the body, the landscape, roles, gestures, and, above all, reinvents the subject who paints. It is in this inaugural gesture that the concept of automythology is born, formulated by the artist as a key not only to understand what he paints, but how and why he does so.
In his undergraduate thesis, Kuschnir proposes automythology as a poetic process of symbolic self-construction. Unlike autobiography, which seeks a pact of truth with the past, automythology arises from individual experience to elaborate from it a personal mythology, that is, a set of images, narratives, signs and atmospheres that fictionalize the self without reducing it to factual fidelity. What matters to the artist is not the chronological narrative of what he lived, but its poetic reconfiguration. The subject of automythology is one who transforms into a figure, not only a figure of memory, but a figure of delirium, theatricality, the impossible.
This fictionalized subject is embodied by the painter himself, but not limited to him. In Kuschnir’s own words, “creating an automythology means allowing my own image to unfold into roles, my story to become scenes, and those scenes to reveal something that a direct account could not articulate.” Painting thus becomes a symbolic stage on which the artist enacts different versions of himself, versions that may be grotesque or sublime, animalistic or spiritual, violent or delicate. This multiplicity of registers is precisely what distinguishes automythology from a traditional autobiographical practice, what is at stake is not the unity of an I that tells a story, but the multiplicity of a body that fictionalizes itself.
The construction of this intimate mythology involves a repertoire of recurring characters and symbols, beings that repeat in different canvases, in different roles, as if they were actors in a continuous visual dramaturgy. There are masks, mirrors, foliage, animals, ambiguous architectural structures. There is a body that folds, hides, shows itself in almost theatrical poses, as if always on the verge of taking a new form. And there is, above all, an insistence on self-figuration, not as one who seeks to recognize oneself, but as one who desires to multiply oneself. Kuschnir paints himself, but never in the same way. Self-portraiture here is not a place of identity fixation, it is a territory of reinvention.
If there is a constant in this process, it is not in the image itself, but in the gesture of returning to it, of reconfiguring it. The artist paints himself as a tropical body, as a hybrid entity between human and animal, as a figure in suffering or ecstasy, as a baroque saint, as a castaway, as a specter, as a dancer. Each incarnation corresponds to a symbolic situation, perhaps a psychic scene, that is not intended to be true, but necessary. Truth here is not factual, it is symbolic. Painting becomes a sort of ritual or spell, something that does not seek to explain reality, but to transform it.
Kuschnir recognizes in his thesis that the term automythology interacts with traditions of literature and modern art, but proposes his own twist, instead of building a universal or mythological symbolic system in the classical sense, he creates an intimate vocabulary, starting from the body and personal imagination to organize a pictorial cosmogony. It is as if painting were a language through which the artist could speak of himself, but always in an encoded, oblique, fictional manner. Thus, the artist approaches a long lineage of creators who made themselves the subject of art, but does so through a radically allegorical painting, in which the self never appears except under masks, displacements and transformations.
In this sense, the concept of automythology can be understood as a method. A method based on the instability of the subject and the power of fiction as forms of self-knowledge and invention. It is a continuous, rhizomatic process in which each new work dialogues with previous ones, but also displaces the system, expands the field, disrupts coherence. Automythology, as the artist himself states, is not a closed project, but a field in expansion, a mobile geography of self in which boundaries blur and identity becomes a territory of experimentation.
There is, in this proposition, a political and poetic radicality. By refusing self-portraiture as the crystallization of the self and insisting on metamorphosis as a mode of pictorial existence, Kuschnir points to a mutating subjectivity, built in the inter-space of image and absence, figure and allegory, memory and invention. Consequently, automythology is also a critique of the idea of fixed identity and an invitation to inhabit the becomings of one’s own body.
There is a recurring image that always returns when discussing an artist’s relationship with their canvas, that of confrontation. But in Antonio Kuschnir’s case, confrontation is not a metaphor, it is a method. For him, painting is, in the words of the artist himself, a “battleground in constant contradiction”. Each canvas does not resolve itself, it rubs itself. It is a terrain where irreconcilable forces meet and contaminate each other: controlled gesture and accident, pose and loss of form, symbol and noise, intimate and historical. Kuschnir paints from this friction, he does not seek conciliation, but the spark born from confrontation.
This image of a battlefield directly refers to the famous phrase by Philip Guston, who said that the painter, in front of the canvas, “is the prosecutor, the accused, the advocate, the judge and the jury”. In other words, the artist is all roles at once, responsible for putting themselves on trial, but also the one who performs, distorts, absolves, sabotages and saves themselves. In Kuschnir’s work, this dynamic of intimate tribunal is enacted pictorially as a dramaturgy of self: his characters, his bodies, his roles all orbit this permanent trial where the self is never one, but always a specter of itself. There is guilt, there is farce, there is expiation and excess. The canvas is both stage and tribunal.
However, this stage is not flat. It is, to use Georges Didi‑Huberman’s expression, a palimpsest of presences. Just as the French theorist describes in L’Image survivante the image as a field of survivals, where ghosts, heterogeneous times and historical signs overlap, Kuschnir’s painting too is built as strata, not as a smooth surface. Each fictional scene he paints is, at the same time, inscription and superimposition: personal mythologies, bodily impulses, tropical heritages, fragments of art history, allegories of sexuality and contemporary social tensions coexist within it. The image does not close, it overflows.
That is why his painting cannot be understood only as narrative. It does not align itself, it does not resolve into a plot. On the contrary, it opens as testimony, but a testimony that neither asserts nor denies, that does not deliver a univocal discourse but a form of ambivalent presence. What testifies there is the very process of confrontation between the artist and his ghosts. The brush oscillates between control and risk, the figure appears only to then disfigure, the symbol stabilizes just to be corroded. What is offered to the gaze is not the image of certainty, but the visuality of a dilemma.
This gesture, radically contemporary, does not reject tradition, on the contrary, Kuschnir mobilizes it. But he mobilizes it as one who rummages through an archive, who reenacts an ancient myth with new masks, new bodies, new clothes. The canvas then transforms into a device of encounters, between the classical and the tropical, the baroque and the queer, religious painting and delirium scene. What emerges from this constellation is a space that never fully closes – an imaginal, unstable, porous space. The canvas is territory of collision, but also symbolic reconciliation, albeit temporary.
Thus, Kuschnir’s painting does not represent only an I in crisis or invention. It enacts the very condition of the image in contemporary times: an image that is not an index but a ruin, not a mirror but a theater, not a reflection but an invention of a reflection that never existed. His painting is, in this sense, a symbolic machine: it operates through juxtaposition, displacement, resurgence and transfiguration. Time is not linear, the body is not fixed, the scene is not clear. Everything pulses in a rhythm of deferred return, as Didi‑Huberman would say, the return of something that maybe never existed, but insists on reappearing.
Kuschnir paints himself not to represent, but to poetically disfigure. And it is in this operation that his automythology gains body as an aesthetic and political form: it is a way to resist erasure, simplification, identity fixation. The canvas is open contradiction. Painting here is an ethical and existential gesture, it is deciding to keep open the wound of form, the fissure of meaning, the instability of self.
This singular operation, as we will see next, must be understood not in isolation, but in dialogue with the history of Brazilian painting, contemporary debates on identity, the intersections between figuration and fiction, and the exhibition project of O Canto do Rio. But we must begin here, where everything starts, with that inaugural gesture of painting oneself as one invents, as one founds a world at once intimate and mythological, made not to represent the past but to dream the present in images.
2. Currents and Confluences, Movements in Painting
The trajectory of painting in Brazil, since the second half of the 20th century, is marked by comings and goings, by erasures and resurgences. In the 1960s and 1970s, the artistic field was profoundly impacted by conceptual avant‑gardes and poetics of dematerialization, concrete experimentalism, minimalism, arte povera, photography, performance and installation instituted a critical regime in which painting began to be seen, often, as an exhausted language, ideologically naive or formally conservative. The materiality of paint, the figure, the gesture, everything seemed to refer to a pre‑conceptual past that the discourse of art then wished to overcome. Yet even in the shadow of these critiques, painting remained active, tense, latent.
This latency gave rise, in the 1980s, to a vigorous revival on an international scale. German neo‑expressionism (Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff) and Italian Transavanguardia (Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi) were challenging the conceptual dogmas of post‑minimalism, bringing back the human figure, archaic myths, the violence of color and the affective dimension of painting. This revival in the 1980s was both a recovery and an invention, it was not about returning to an academic tradition, but about establishing, on top of it, a field of friction between the residue of history and the ghosts of the present.
In strong dialogue with international developments, painting in Brazil during the 1980s re‑emerged as a field of subjective reinvention, with narrative strength, gestural freedom and a renewed historical consciousness, also thanks to the Brazilian political context of re‑democratization after two decades of military dictatorship which offered fertile ground for an explosion of the sensible. There was a movement of re‑appropriation of figuration, color, the material thickness of paint and performance as a pictorial gesture, rescuing painting as a modality of narrative and pictorial reinvention. Exhibitions such as Como vai você Geração 80? and BR/80 brought to light young artists who reclaimed painting as a language capable of reenacting affections, deliria, gestures and excesses. At Ateliê Casa7, one of the most emblematic groups of the time, artists like Nuno Ramos, Rodrigo Andrade and Carlito Carvalhosa developed a painting marked by stain, by the physicality of the surface, by the speed of gesture, not to restore a formal order but to establish a new field of symbolic possibilities.
It is in this context that Marco Giannotti, in Short History of Contemporary Painting, proposes three central categories to understand painting from the 1960s onward, gesture, matter and narrative. Gesture in contemporary painting is no longer merely the artist’s bodily mark on the canvas, it is also an index of time, hesitation, loss. Post‑1960 painting can no longer be understood as mere continuity of the modern project, it carries within itself the collapse of its promises. And it is precisely from this collapse that a new consciousness emerges, gesture becomes evidence of failure, doubt, incompletion, the opposite of technical mastery, the antithesis of formal assertiveness. It is a vulnerable inscription in the image space, a writing torn between what one desires and what one can say, and in post‑1980 Brazilian painting, this gesture gains historical thickness.
Meanwhile, pictorial matter in this context ceases to be just support and becomes a field of symbolic confrontation. As Giannotti notes, matter in contemporary painting is not neutral, it carries residues, evocations, noise, it stops obeying a decorative or representational logic, and begins to behave as a sensitive palimpsest. Painters like Paulo Pasta, for example, operate with an economical palette, constructing delicate relations between layers, lights and erasures. Meanwhile, artists like Adriana Varejão, Daniel Senise or Nuno Ramos invest in matter as residue, as an index of the violent and unrepresentable real, whether through fissure, impasto or collage of ruins. Canvas stops being a window and becomes a territory of conflict.
Finally, narrative or rather resistance to narrative emerges as another field of tension. Giannotti observes that contemporary painting lives under the sign of fragmentation, collage, juxtaposition, cutting, displacement become strategies to articulate non‑linear meanings. Images no longer tell stories, they build constellations. As Aby Warburg tells us, every image carries ghosts. Painting becomes a place of survival, where personal, cultural and collective mythologies intersect in friction.
In 1990s Brazilian painting, on one hand, some artists began to build poetics where pictorial matter behaves like archive, like contaminated surface, like skin or ornament. Canvas during this period increasingly becomes an expanded field, where collages, fissures, cuts and textures become ways to narrate the unrepresentable. On the other hand, inside studios and art schools, another current of artists led to a return with attention to painting “in itself”, to contained gesture, constructed light, color as structure, assuming a role of mediation between the historical density of painting and its potential for silent lyricism.
From these two vectors, the expanded field of matter and the rigorous investigation of form, a new generation of painters emerged in the 2000s. The group 2000e8, which formed around Paulo Pasta, marked a critical position against the hegemony of performance and photography in the institutional circuit. Artists like Ana Elisa Egreja, Bruno Dunley, Regina Parra, among others, began to operate with figurative, sensitive, architectural, often melancholic painting, where body and home merge, spaces become psychological, and where time always seems suspended; their practice reaffirmed the canvas as a space of poetic and sensorial enunciation, even if contained, even if ambiguous.
If on one side artists like Egreja, Rodolpho Parigi and Rafael Carneiro build narrative pictorial universes but always on the verge of hallucination, nonsense or phantasmagoric hyperrealism, on the other side abstract painting remains alive in names like Marina Rheingantz and Lucas Arruda who transform the canvas into an unreachable horizon, territory of the ineffable. In both cases narrative arises by poetic summons not by discursive linearity. The viewer does not read painting, he inhabits it, with all the risks of wandering and imprecision.
In recent decades, therefore, painting in Brazil has strengthened as a central language of the artistic circuit, both institutionally and in the market. This protagonism is due partly to the public’s easy recognition of painting as a “place of art”, but also its malleability in the face of contemporary critical demands. Painting remains a place of desire, invention and friction. As we have seen, one can generally observe that the current panorama of Brazilian painting is divided, in a non-exclusive way, between painting that investigates its own codes, light, facture, gesture, structure, and painting that uses the image as symbolic device to address social issues, race, gender, sexuality, politics, spirituality, ecology. This tension between painting that speaks of itself and painting that speaks of the world characterizes the potency of contemporary production.
There are also those who operate at the intersection of these two paths, creating works that are simultaneously expressive and political, symbolic and discursive. And it is precisely at this point of intersection, where tradition and experimentation meet, that we locate Antonio Kuschnir’s practice in this unstable space, between formal introspection and symbolic affirmation, between historical legacy and subjective experimentation. His painting does not inherit this panorama as something resolved, he crosses it. Kuschnir mobilizes hesitant gesture, intense matter and allegorical narrative as vectors of his personal practice, the practice he himself calls automythology. In his work gesture does not affirm, it performs lit; matter does not represent, it pulses; narrative does not explain, it fables. His painting is an intimate, ritual theater where possible and impossible, infancy and mask, delirium and memory are performed.
3. Tides of Being: Scene and Transformation
If contemporary Brazilian painting, as we have seen, is traversed by tensions between formal experimentation and discursive urgency, between heritage and rupture, Antonio Kuschnir’s work is situated precisely in between intimacy and critique, tradition and tropical reinvention, body and its symbolic foldings. His painting does not arise from the desire to take a side but from the refusal of the dichotomy. With each work Kuschnir establishes an intermediate, even eccentric, space where image does not illustrate but acts, where the self does not reveal itself but performs, where visual language becomes personal mythology and political gesture.
That gesture is the living expression of Kuschnir’s automythology, his concrete operation. Kuschnir does not paint to represent himself but to give form to a multiple, allegorical, ritual existence. Painting becomes the place where the artist can be beast, specter, saint, martyr, child, man, woman, no one. Each figure is a role to inhabit, a mask used not to hide but to multiply. Like Artaud in theater and Didi‑Huberman in imagery, Kuschnir gives painting the task of making visible what insists on not disappearing – pain, desire, myth, absurdity, the irreducible beauty of the impossible.
That impossible is the raw material of his poetics. Kuschnir’s canvases are not concerned with realism but with intensity. Bodies fold improbably, eyes multiply, gestures stop mid‑delirium. His compositions evoke narratives that never conclude, symbolic constellations in which each element relates to all others through echoes and vibrations, not linear causality. This non‑linearity also reflects in Kuschnir’s working method, as if he sought in painting an emotional archaeology of himself, not an origin but a survival.
This personal archaeology crosses with the archive of art history. Kuschnir is a Latin American artist living and working in Europe, and this geographic and symbolic movement is structural not incidental. Like Tarsila do Amaral in Paris, Mira Schendel in Switzerland, Iberê in Rome, he writes himself into the tradition of southern artists who look north not with reverence but with a desire for mixing. Europe in his painting is not a canon but a symbolic territory to be reorganized. Kuschnir reorganizes it with the matter of his tropical experience, the light of his country, the restless sexuality of his bodies, the baroque theatricality of his childhood, the violence and beauty that traverse his gaze.
From early on Kuschnir maintains an intense relationship with tradition: Rubens, Tintoretto, Titian, Pontormo, but especially Matisse, a master of not only color and composition but atelier ethics. From Matisse Kuschnir learns that painting is also repetition, care, silence. In that laborious silence he activates the legacy of the old masters not as dead monuments but living presences breathing through his gestures. When citation appears it is never literal but always displaced, fabulated, performed. Like an actor improvising Shakespeare, Kuschnir dialogues with art history reinventing, deforming, tropicalizing, feminizing, Brazilianizing its codes.
This deformation is not destruction but an act of love. Tradition in his painting is organic matter that can be touched, shaped, relearned. Classical figures twist, expand, shift not to be undone but to gain new vitality. Kuschnir does not fear the canon because he understands it as living language transformed through use and practice. In his hands Baroque gestures, Mannerism, sacred painting reconfigure as queer, fabular, tropical gestures. There is no parody but re‑enchantment. The very idea of automythology expands in this gesture. Once spoken of as a method of self‑invention, here it also becomes critical language: a way to both belong and disobey.
Kuschnir aligns with a lineage spanning Frida Kahlo to Louise Bourgeois, Pierre Klossowski to Leonilson, artists who made themselves fields of symbolic operation where the intimate is always collective. By painting himself as beast, saint, body in trance, Kuschnir does not seek confession but transformation. And in that transformation his painting becomes political.
This politics does not arise from denunciation but from reconfiguration of the sensible as Jacques Rancière suggests. Kuschnir does not shout, he addresses. His figures do not demand but haunt. They persist in the gaze asking us: what if you were that? What if that possible other existed within you? His painting invites us to alterity not of external other but of the other who inhabits us. And that invitation is deeply ethical challenging us to imagine the world not as it is but as it could be.
His images are not fixed allegories but zones of passage. The canvas is less representation than collision. There the body meets color, gesture meets memory, tradition meets delirium. Everything is in transit: identity, narrative, time. As in Didi‑Huberman imagery survives because it pulses. What we see is always that which insists on not disappearing. Kuschnir offers us those survivals: fragments of personal myths, ruins of a self reinvented in each painting, tropical ghosts still dancing under the European sun.
It is this process, between the theater of the intimate and choreography of displacement, that prepares the ground for the exhibition O Canto do Rio. This body of recent works concretizes and deepens the central dimensions of his poetics: the fable of identity, the mobile rooting between territories, painting as space where the self multiplies on stage, where the impossible takes visible form, and where the river running between banks finally learns to sing.
4. The Singing River: Flow, Transformation, and Encounter
Painting, in its most vivid form, pulses between the skin and the world. When it transforms into song, it expands, becoming ritual, interior landscape, the enunciation of a time that escapes logic and settles into the body. This is how Antonio Kuschnir’s gesture takes shape: a painting that does not narrate but fabulates, that does not explain but summons. In the exhibition O Canto do Rio, this vocation crystallizes into territory: 29 works that do not form a series but a constellation. Intimate fragments staged as personal myths, figures that bend between delirium and devotion, play and abyss.
The images that emerge from these canvases do not obey the grammar of reality. They are flows, visions, bodies that perform the artist himself and also exceed him, hybrids, androgynous beings, lay saints, transfigured eroticisms. Kuschnir does not represent himself, he invents himself. And in this gesture, he weaves an automythology in which the self dissolves and reforms into figure, color, and desire. Each work is a place, or better, an inter-place, where memory, landscape, and dream become entangled.
The exhibition takes the form of a score, a visual song in which each painting is a note, a breath. The canto in the title carries multiple layers: sound and shelter, edge and voice. It alludes to Rio de Janeiro, not the geographic one, but the one of tropical sensoriality, of sunlight through leaves, of salt clinging to the skin. But it also evokes crossing: between languages, between continents, between ways of seeing and being.
The pictorial references are there. But there is something untamed in how these influences merge with the matter of the present — a present that is tropical, sensual, and fabulated. The color vibrates dirty, impure, solar. The composition is not organized by balance but by emotional accumulation. Everything escapes: narratives, bodies, symbols. And in this escape, space is created for the impossible — a place where the image does not need to make sense, only to reverberate.
In Kuschnir’s gesture, painting shelters a subject who does not wish to be fixed, but to inhabit oscillation. His images are places where the body transforms, where myth is intimate, where memory blends with delirium like pigments mixed on the same palette. And perhaps this is what remains, after all: the creation of a space where the gaze may rest, where the image offers itself as a temporary home, where the imagination becomes shelter, and the impossible, a way of speaking.
ANTONIO KUSCHNIR
“O Canto do Rio”
Text by Domenico de Chirico
ABC-ARTE presents “O Canto do Rio”, the most extensive solo exhibition in Italy dedicated to the very young Brazilian painter Antonio Kuschnir (Rio de Janeiro, 2001), an artist who skillfully transforms painting into a rich narrative device, characterized by a strongly symbolic and visionary structure. Through a generous body of work, the public is invited to immerse themselves in a dreamlike and layered figurative universe, where nature and the Anthropocene, myth and autobiography, dream and memory intertwine in a dense network of iconographic and poetic references. His compositions, animated by archetypal characters, almost sylvan fantastic creatures and symbolic elements, take shape as true visual “auto-mythologies”: fluid narratives that combine subjective memory and shared imagination.
Kuschnir – an artist of the so-called post-media generation and a child of an era dominated by images – develops a pictorial language nourished by a rich confluence of heterogeneous sources ranging from classical mythology to Brazilian folklore, from European art history to contemporary visual culture. An intense and vibrant color palette accompanies this multiplicity of references, giving rise to a personal and layered visual grammar, in which imagination and structure harmoniously coexist in complex pictorial constructions, weaving a dense fabric of symbols and narrative tensions. His works also reflect an interest in theatricality and staging, traceable in the presence of scenic elements such as curtains and wings, which introduce and feed liminal dimensions, suspended between reality and fiction.
His oil painting, interwoven with a gesturality that is both ritual and meticulous, and animated by dynamic energy, gives life to dense and vibrant surfaces. A particularly bright palette, often enlivened by authentic gleams, defines atmospheres suspended between rite and dream. The light, almost never naturalistic, assumes an emotional, theatrical, and mystical character, transforming each canvas into a perceptual threshold that catapults us, stealthily, into the depths of the unconscious and into the most fantastic mythopoetic dimension.
Antonio Kuschnir constructs non-linear and non-hierarchical narratives that subvert the conventions of perspective and depth. Adapting to the concept of “Dasein”, or Heideggerian “being-in-the-world” – understood as the individual “always ahead of himself”, projected into the future and capable of designing his own existence – these imaginative compositions appear as true mise-en-scènes. Here, objects of various natures, taxidermies, mythical animals, sometimes bifurcated anthropomorphic figures, warriors, mermaids, fauns, unusual Venuses, minstrels, the iconic Icarus and various flying creatures with colorful and widely spread wings, along with portraits of real people, harmoniously insert themselves into lush landscapes, surrounded by quiet and mysterious rivers, and topped by clear, animated skies, sometimes starry. These elements overlap or stand side by side, creating free conglomerates that recall the processes of memory or, perhaps more simply, the pareidolic illusion. His works, in their entirety, do not offer univocal readings, but open interpretive spaces that actively involve the viewer, guided by evocative titles that suggest various interpretive keys without ever imposing a single interpretation.
In tune with the poetry of his fellow countryman Manoel de Barros, formally considered a post-modernist poet close to the European avant-gardes, who explores the human condition and celebrates the beauty of childhood, nature, small things, the ephemeral and the incomplete, Kuschnir invites us to look at his images with dreamy eyes, transporting us to a world where painting, body, story, and vision harmoniously merge. Just as Barros celebrated the ineffable, Kuschnir explores the intertwining of intimacy and allegory, historical-cultural memory and new imagination. O Canto do Rio thus becomes an immersive journey into a suspended universe, where beauty lies in the non-didactic and in the tension between the everyday and the infinite, similar to that which characterizes the Pantanal — the largest wetland in the world, located mainly in Brazil — a magical, lofty, and suspended place, where, as Barros himself said about poetry, “it is possible to fly outside the wings.”
In light of these premises, we can surely say that Antonio Kuschnir, while remaining deeply tied to his culture of origin, fully fits into a long European tradition, reinterpreting it with a unique sensibility that celebrates the richness of cultural diversity. His work stands out for a profound interest in dream and myth, themes that, combined with rigorous formal and conceptual research, evoke surrealism without ever reducing themselves to mere imitation. His paintings are a continuous flow of universal experiences that transcend the traditional distinctions between Latin America and Europe. Therefore, “O Canto do Rio” is not only a reflection on mythology and collective memory but a fascinating example of how contemporary art can intertwine with the deepest and most diverse pictorial traditions, creating a bridge between past and present.
Furthermore, starting from medieval aesthetics and, while stylistically dialoguing with the great innovative and visionary European masters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Paul Cézanne, Kuschnir also draws from the fantastic and exotic style of Henri Rousseau, offering a contemporary reinterpretation of the pictorial tradition, enriched by his Brazilian identity. His painting skillfully blends classical references with poetically bold visions, gradually dissolving the boundaries imposed by time and space. In doing so, historical and collective memory intertwines with personal memory, creating a pictorial language that flows seamlessly through countless eras and geographies. Like the great European masters, Kuschnir becomes an omniscient narrator, but with a gaze always turned toward modernity, where myth is not only a legacy of the past but also a continuous drive for renewal.
In this way, he invites the viewer to experience his frescoed world as a gateway to a new universe of myths and memories, where European and Brazilian culture meet in freedom, confront one another, and enrich each other. His work is an invitation to look beyond traditional boundaries and to actively participate in the creation of meaning, transforming each painting into a place of encounter and shared discovery. As in Italo Calvino’s fantastic and allegorical trilogy on contemporary man, Our Ancestors, in which characters like the Cloven Viscount, the Baron in the Trees, and the Nonexistent Knight dwell in a limbo between the concrete and the imaginary, far from the raw materiality and ever more pressing urgency of the everyday, immersed in a symbolic universe made of passions, pains, loves, misfortunes, hopes, and illusions, so too in Kuschnir’s works, symbols and figures, real or mythological, intertwine in a variety of emotions and bucolic scenarios to deeply explore the contemporary human condition, the one closest to him. Thus, through a personal yet universal language, Antonio Kuschnir invites us to reflect on the power of imagination and the fluidity between the visible and the invisible, giving rise to experiences that stimulate freedom of thought and progressively foster the discovery of a chorus of ever-new and surprising meanings.Breaths Toward Other Chants
by MANDÚ
Night falls, lifting a bluish curtain: a flying river, inhabited by hybrid creatures from a sky located in another atmosphere, pours over the audience. Someone tells us this is the dawn of something new. The figure of a horse, right at the entrance, invites us to what has not yet been seen but is already on its way, arriving from fertile lands, diverse fauna, and viscous terrain, which, in the work, reveals itself as a desert-like place, a midway point, a long journey to the edge of the world.
In an exhibition divided into four poetic acts, to evoke a river as a visual witness is to navigate between frequencies from here and there, along the banks, a proposal uninterested in constructing parallels or distances between one side and the other, but instead concerned with the paradoxes of what becomes possible during the journey.
A journey free from anthropophagic desire, yet dense in the gaze of one who steps carefully and absorbs what is needed. A gesture I call vernacular painting: something added at each step, yet carrying a pouch full of memories, layers, and personal details ,obsessively accumulated by Antonio.
It is impossible not to dwell on the garments: I recall that in our studio conversations, where we would wander through thoughts for hours, we came to imagine that these outfits might become markers of time in his work. There is interest in seeing the figurative nature of these garments as details or edges, for the artist immersed himself in the immensity of each one for so long and with so many layers that he transformed them into autonomous landscapes, even within extremely orchestrated compositions.
The bluish curtain that has accompanied us from the beginning now announces the end, but, as in theater, also the beginning of a new act. A *grand finale* of images that concern themselves, technically, with occupying every plane of the canvas, uniting elements and beings in a post-climax, and which, through their very excess, open up an inviting space for the viewer, who may now fabricate their own fables, starting from within, carrying into the exhibition their own world, now permeated by these other worlds as well.
I evoke the image of the Urutau bird, or moon bird, in dialogue with all the wings made evident from one work to another, perched on the tip of a dry branch, gazing at the night with eyes turned upward. Through a fragmented breath, it emits a melancholic song, often confused with a human female lament, for some, something akin to what we call opera. A song so beautiful and deep that, in localized cosmologies, it may be interpreted as the moment of death or of transformation into what is yet to become, a kind of breath echoing so intensely that it crosses geographic fictions and borders: a breath toward other chants of the world.