OPENING Arcádia Incerta, Antonio Kuschnir: with critical contribution by Milovan Farronato

ABC-ARTE is pleased to present Arcádia Incerta, the new solo exhibition by Antonio Kuschnir (Rio de Janeiro, 2001) at the gallery’s Milan venue, with a critical contribution by Milovan Farronato.

The project originates from the pastoral imaginary, historically understood as a space of calm and compensation, and reinterprets it today as an unstable territory crossed by latent tensions and narrative ambiguities. In a time marked by the erosion of boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the Arcadian scene loses its innocence and becomes a fragile, exposed place in which beauty coexists with a subtle sense of unease. This tension runs through a pictorial practice that has already received institutional recognition, with works included in important public collections in Brazil, among them the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói (MAC), where he became the youngest artist in the museum’s history to present a solo exhibition.

In Kuschnir’s paintings, nature is never a mere backdrop, but the stage for a complex mise-en-scène populated by figures suspended in a condition of waiting. Characters drawn from different temporalities and imaginaries inhabit the same space, as if the narrative were already underway and lacked a defined beginning. Rest, encounter, and danger coexist beneath a threshold of apparent harmony, while hybrid and symbolic presences blend into the landscape, turning threat into a latent condition rather than a manifest event. Works from this cycle are also part of the collection of the Presidency of the Federative Republic of Brazil and the São Paulo Cultural Diversity Center.

Kuschnir’s painting unfolds through progressive shifts: from a distance the scenes appear legible and narrative, but upon closer inspection bodies dissolve into ornamental surfaces dense with marks and colour, where figuration slows down and the gaze is held by the materiality of paint. Over the course of the exhibition, the Arcadian scene fractures, the light changes, and what had remained restrained emerges, brushing against conflict without ever resolving into a single, definitive conclusion.

Antonio Kuschnir began painting at the age of six, attending courses at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. Raised among forests, mountains, and the sea of Brazil’s tropical landscape, he developed at an early age a pictorial sensibility rooted in the symbolic power of natural elements. After completing his academic training between Rio de Janeiro and Europe, he now lives between Germany and Brazil and was recently an artist-in-residence at the La Napoule Art Foundation, in the south of France.

Arcádia Incerta will be on view from 26 February to 4 April at ABC-ARTE ONE OF, Via Santa Croce 21, Milan.

The vernissage will take place on Thursday, 26 February from 6:30 pm, and the opening evening will also celebrate the artist’s birthday.