Hailing from Rio de Janeiro, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno’s life, work, and worldview have been shaped by a lifetime of traveling the globe, fostering a sense of displacement and search for belonging through the act of making art.
Like French artist Dora Maar, who reinvented her photography practice in her 70s, Cattaneo Adorno has entered a new chapter of her life after taking up photography at age 60 in 2013. “Photography is a journey of discovery,” she says. “I am always looking, wondering, questioning, seeking to understand the world in what it reveals — and what it hides — in plain sight.”
Over the past decade, Cattaneo Adorno has honed her passion for adventure, creativity, and play by using photography to uncover the spaces between reality and illusion. In her hands, the camera becomes a visa for another realm: a world of experimentation and innovation in both photography and book publishing.
With the publication of her fourth monograph, Ten Years and solo exhibition of the same name at the 7th edition of Personal Structures, which runs parallel with the 60th Venice Biennale, Cattaneo Adorno and co-curator Andrea Verganti elegantly blend the essence of her previous series to distill a poignant sense of mysticism suffusing our daily lives.
Passport into Another Realm
Organized by the European Cultural Centre, the 2024 edition of Personal Structures focuses on the experience of foreigners, émigrés, exiled, and refugees, especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.
With Ten Years, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno revisits her travels through Mauritius, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore, New York, London, Italy, Portugal, and Japan. Printed in gold metallic ink on black paper, her glittering scenes of daily life are transformed into surreal meditations of otherness as mysterious as existence itself.
“With the camera, I can capture a fleeting moment before it disappears, preserving its majesty and mystery for future contemplation,” Cattaneo Adorno says. “Like memories, my photographs flicker and flow in the space that lies in between fantasy and reality. I am fascinated by the way light and shadow, color and form can transform the material world into optical illusion so that it feels as though we are moving weightlessly through a dream.”
A Shared Sense of Belonging
With Ten Years, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno returns to where it all began: a profound sense of curiosity, enchantment, and wonder. Like painter Tarsila do Amaral, she embraces the lush expanses of Brazilian modernism, combining the intricate symbolism of their native land with exquisitely stylized compositions to evoke a shared sense of belonging.
From the outset, the brazilian photographer was drawn to street photography to create a sense of place when she was far from home for her first monograph, The Other Half of the Sky. She then returned to Ipanema, the fabled Rio de Janeiro beach of her childhood, where she began printing images in gold and silver inks to evoke the elements of water, earth, sun, and sky for her second monograph, to create Águas de Ouro (Portuguese for “waters of gold”).
Drawn to sweeping dreamscapes where abstract and figurative elements freely co-exist, Cattaneo Adorno began experimenting with reflections to create her third monograph, Scarti di Tempo (Italian for “scraps of time” or “time discrepancy”). Building on this for Ten Years, Cattaneo Adorno delves into another layer of the in/visible world, using inverted images as a starting point to explore the otherworldly possibilities of negative space.
Adopting an effect reminiscent of the photogenic drawing process started by William Henry Fox Talbot as early as 1834, Cattaneo Adorno centers the presence of negative space in her work. What emerges is the curious sensation of dislocation that exists in the shadow world, while she simultaneously illuminates a new presence in gold that recalls the delicate splendors of Gustav Klimt’s symbolist paintings and the golden paint of Brazilian dancers at Carnival.
Pages From the Book of Life
Coming full circle, Sandra Cattaneo Adorno’s new monograph, Ten Years, stands at the center of the Venice exhibition as a monument to the possibilities of the printed objet d’arte. Drawing inspiration from artist scrapbooks and leporellos, the book adopts the accordion format to imagine the photographs as notes one would make in a diary.
Resisting the notions of beginning and end, Cattaneo Adorno envisions Ten Years as a scroll where stories unfold in fragmented and layered narratives, much like travel itself. The photographs meld one another, unveiling the complex interplay between dislocation and interconnection equal parts enigmatic and profound.
Stripped from their original context and rearranged to form new ideas, these works allow us to delve deeper inside ourselves and connect with the joy discovery brings. For Sandra Cattaneo Adorno, photography is more than what lies on the other side of the lens; it is a progression beyond the known to discover something new for ourselves.
Sandra Cattaneo Adorno: Ten Years is on view April 20–November 24, 2024 at Palazzo Bembo in Venice. Sandra Cattaneo Adorno: Ten Years is published by European Cultural Center | Radius Books, $60.00.
