ABC-ARTE presents the catalogue O Canto do Rio, which retraces the first solo exhibition of young Brazilian painter Antonio Kuschnir—a visionary artist who weaves together nature and the unconscious, dream and memory, myth and autobiography.
Kuschnir’s artistic journey unfolds as a layered interplay between individual and collective memory, universal archetypes and classical iconographies. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 2001, the artist approaches painting as a mythopoetic form of writing, where the act of painting also becomes an exercise in listening, reflection, and emotional fiction.
“Antonio’s love for painting is visible, incandescent. His practice is a visual diary, a tool for self-discovery, a vital process that has accompanied him since childhood. His life stories and his artworks move together, as if one were an extension of the other—or like a dance where you can no longer tell where the body ends and the gesture begins,” writes curator Barbara Magliocco.
“His works, which he defines as ‘auto-mythologies,’ are visual narratives that intertwine intimate experiences, dreams, literary fragments, and painterly references.”
“Antonio Kuschnir constructs non-linear, non-hierarchical narratives that subvert conventional ideas of perspective and depth. [...] In doing so, he invites the viewer to experience his frescoed world as a gateway into an unprecedented universe of myths and memories.”
— Domenico de Chirico
The exhibition, laid out across four rooms, offers an immersive experience open to viewer participation. Each work is a threshold to another possible reality, where even the most fragile aspects of the real can be transformed into legend. The exhibition features works from Antonio’s most recent series, where he works through visual and associative sequences, turning each painting into a narrative chapter. The materiality of painting—central to his practice—emerges through a persistent, ritualistic brushstroke and a vibrant palette that builds atmospheres suspended between dream and ritual.
Light plays a theatrical, mystical, and never naturalistic role: it becomes both expressive and dramaturgical, turning 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 get lost in the play of images.”
— Pedro Scudeller
The title of the exhibition, O Canto do Rio, evokes both an inner song and a symbolic place: a stream of imagination inhabited by gods and monsters, jungles and serpents, silences and delusions. Kuschnir reinvents the visible, drawing the viewer into a threshold between the unconscious, childhood, and myth.
“Night falls, bringing with it a bluish veil, a flying river, hybrid creatures dwelling in a sky located in another atmosphere—like the arrival of a new world... At the edges of the world, in the song of the river, lies fertile ground for the creation of everything that until now was deemed impossible.”
— Mandú
