ABC-ARTE presents O Canto do Rio, the first solo exhibition to date by the young Brazilian painter Antonio Kuschnir—a visionary artist who weaves together nature and the unconscious, dream and memory, myth and autobiography. The show transforms the Genoa venue into a full immersion into the artist’s visual universe, showcasing a large nucleus of works that include richly narrative compositions populated by mythological figures, symbolic creatures, and archetypal presences.
Kuschnir’s artistic path unfolds as a layered weave of individual and collective memory, universal archetypes, and classical iconographies. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 2001, the artist approaches painting as a form of mythopoetic writing, where the act of painting also becomes an exercise in listening, reflection, and emotional fiction.
«Antonio’s love for painting is palpable, incandescent. His practice is a visual diary, a tool of self-discovery, a vital process that has accompanied him since childhood. His life stories and his paintings move together, as if one were the extension of the other—or like a dance where it’s no longer possible to tell where the body ends and the gesture begins» writes Barbara Magliocco.
His works, which he calls auto-mythologies, are visual narratives in which intimate experiences, dreams, literary fragments, and painterly references intertwine.
«Antonio Kuschnir constructs non-linear, non-hierarchical narratives that subvert the conventions of perspective and depth. […] In doing so, he invites the viewer to inhabit his frescoed world as a portal into an unexplored universe of myth and memories» (Domenico de Chirico).
Spread across four rooms, the exhibition is conceived as an immersive experience that actively involves the viewer. Each work functions as a threshold to a possible elsewhere, where even the most fragile aspects of reality can be transformed into legend. The exhibition includes works from Kuschnir’s most recent series, in which he develops visual and associative sequences, turning each painting into a narrative chapter. Paint, a central element in his research, emerges through a persistent, ritualistic brushstroke and a vibrant palette that constructs atmospheres suspended between dream and rite. Light is theatrical, mystical, never naturalistic: an expressive and dramaturgical element that turns each canvas into a perceptual threshold.
«The works appear as scenes from an elusive theatre, where signs accumulate in layers and suggest unstable meanings—rather than offering answers, they invite the gaze to lose itself in the play of images.» (Pedro Scudeller).
The exhibition title, O Canto do Rio (The Song of the River), evokes both an inner song and a symbolic place: a current of imagination inhabited by gods and monsters, jungles and serpents, silences and deliria. Kuschnir reinvents the visible, transporting the viewer to a threshold between unconsciousness, childhood, and myth.
«Night falls, casting a bluish veil—a flying river, hybrid creatures inhabiting a sky in a different atmosphere, as if announcing the arrival of a new world… At the edge of the world, in the song of the river, a fertile ground emerges for the creation of everything that has until now seemed impossible» (Mandú).
The exhibition will be open to the public from June 26 to August 31, 2025, at ABC-ARTE’s Genoa location.
The opening event will take place on Thursday, June 26, starting at 6:30 PM, and will feature a live DJ set by selector Pierka, offering an eclectic mix of world music, favela funk, and zouk, creating a multisensory experience in dialogue with the artist’s imagery.
