Roxana Donaldson | Venice Biennale 2022 | Revista ARTA Featured Artist

| CONCEPTUAL LOG

“Participating in this dossier was an opportunity to translate the ‘subjectivity of looking’ into a visual dialogue. My contribution addresses the tension between the organic and the constructed, a theme that remains central to my research.

When, during the structural gestation of Arta magazine’s 56-57/2022 issue, I was invited by Daria Ghiu to contribute an artistic intervention—a Romanian resonance, of sorts, to Cecilia Alemani’s curated vision in Venice I decided to chose works from my Fairy Tales series. I therefore “transplanted” for my Arta intervention two works, The Childhood of the Elephant Matriarch and The Unfinished Flower, accompanied by a text. Both were conceived and executed in 2020, emerging from the rhythmic confinement of the pandemic. I had seen

The 2022 Venice Biennale resonated with a particular clinical intensity. There, I collided with the ghosts of Leonora Carrington and Katharina Fritsch—artists who have long served as my intellectual coordinates. The Milk of Dreams in Venice and the visit triggered a conceptual alignment.

When I finally reached Venice in 2022 and encountered The Milk of Dreams in the flesh, the sensation was binary: yes, this is the trajectory. I recall a sharp surge of clarity—not pride, but a cold recognition—that my 2020 intuition had already navigated itself, unguided, toward this exact point.

Back in 2020, as I began these paintings, the mundane rituals of the pandemic dictated the rhythm of my days. I did not anticipate such an immediate alignment with my own investigation into the vegetal, the fantastic, and the anatomical reality of the female artist. But does intuition ever require a map? I guess it was just meant to happen…