First Meeting is the first monograph on Argentinian artist Santiago de Paoli. From his early, experimental projects to his most recent explorations, the book delves into his innovative approach of painting on unconventional materials. The book features commissioned essays by Fernanda Brenner and Mariano Mayer, as well as a conversation between Christian Rattemeyer and the artist.
Infinite Memory is Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s first monograph, co-published with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and Lenz. Like a memory card, the book stores information about a selection of films from the initial decade of the artists’ practice. Considered as an object, much like a piece of hardware that stores digital memory, the book offers the possibility to scroll infinitely, with no beginning or end.
Through the words of the sound artist and theorist Brandon LaBelle, the book explores the social and relational component of sound that gave rise to Benevolence, the site-specific project by Sonia Boyce. The Joy of Cacophony is the second book in a series of essay collections inspired by the site-specific projects conceived for GAMeC at Palazzo della Ragione.
Consisting of a richly illustrated booklet and a record vinyl, this special release accompanies the performative sound-based project A Comparative Dialogue Act by artists Andrea Mancini and the collective Every Island, hosted in the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Conceived as a catalogue and an artist’s book, the publication offers a deeper insight into the eponymous 2022 exhibition staged at Indipendenza Roma, and explores tensions that can be generated between artworks and their surrounding architectural context, raising questions of taste, value, function and decoration.
The practice of Tomaso Binga (Bianca Pucciarelli Menna, 1931) toys with the notion of gender, reconsidering women’s social roles and rights. This monograph, edited by Eva Fabbris, Lilou Vidal, and Stefania Zuliani, analyses her work through various languages and features a selection of poems, highlighting the author’s critical and artistic approach.
Edited by Andrea Bellini
Texts by Andrea Bellini, Lorraine Mendes, Antonio Obá, Larry Ossei-Mensah
Designed by Lorenzo Mason Studio
2025, English, hardcover, 24 x 30 cm, 224 pages
ISBN 979-12-80579-74-4
Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care traces the practice of the Brazilian artist from 2016 to the present, offering a broad survey of his recent work, dwelling on the recurring motifs and iconographic sources that feed the complex imagery of his painting. Extensively illustrated, the book returns the richness of Obá’s paintings, with enlargements on some of the details woven into the pictorial texture that, in addition to showing his masterful technique, make certain elements of his visual vocabulary stand out.
The conversation between Andrea Bellini and Antonio Obá that opens the book offers the opportunity to learn, through the artist’s voice, about the key passages of his research, and to examine his diverse cultural references—from the Baroque of Minas Gerais to traditional Chinese painting, from Rembrandt to the Catholic ex-votos—until we discover the Obá’s civic vocation, of painting as a spiritual practice.
The two essays commissioned for the occasion analyze the complexity of these layered signifiers. Lorraine Mendes’s essay “Every Boy Is a King” offers an in-depth analysis of Obá’s religious syncretism. It suggests an interpretation of its layered symbols, particularly the sankofa and the deity Exú, both of which pay tribute to the artist’s West African roots. Above and beyond the specific cultural contexts of this iconography, the author emphasizes the universal value of Obá’s work, its evocative, transformative, dynamic power, which—like music or dance—knows no national boundaries or barriers.
Larry Ossei-Mensah’s essay “Embodiment: The Art of Antonio Obá” investigates the complex cultural legacy that is intertwined with the artist’s practice, connected to his Afro-Brazilian roots, to the social and political realities of the Black diaspora, and to Christian, Candomblé, and Umbanda traditions. In addition to examining the context in which Obá’s work is rooted, the author situates it within a galaxy of artists who have focused on questions of identity, often using their own bodies as tools of social and cultural critique.
Completing the book is a chronology, compiled by Sara De Chiara, tracing the artist’s formative years and exhibition history, accompanied by rich documentary materials.
The book is published on the occasion of Antonio Obá: Rituals of Care, the first mid-career survey in Europe dedicated to the Brazilian artist, curated by Andrea Bellini, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève.
