Benigno Mangovo Angola, b. 1993

Born in Cabinda into an artistic family, Benigno Mangovo developed an early passion for painting. He has been exclusively dedicated to his artistic career since 2017, when he joined Patrício Mawete's painting studio in Luanda, a space that significantly contributed to a growing formalization of his artistic production.

Mangovo describes his creative process as generally introspective, drawing on personal experiences, memories, and reflections as sources of reference. His work includes recurring themes such as memory, dreams, emotions, family and interpersonal relationships, and subject-object relations, as well as hope, resilience, human fragility, and its infinite and singular capacity for reinvention and rebirth.

His production is marked by recurrent experimentation aimed at reinventing texture, depth, and color balance. A process that often involves a standardized construction of an identity-related nature, which aesthetically resembles the idea of the existence of circuits of energetic, symbiotic, or synaptic exchange. Patterns that have shaped, over several years, the scenic construction of the background of his canvases, in a distinctive aesthetic-stylistic conception, of a semiotic nature, based on the exploration of signs and the processing of signs inherent in the tradition of the province of Cabinda - where the artist is from - the living space of the local forest, and the universe of vernacular and spiritual culture.

In 2022, Benigno Mangovo was selected to participate in the 2nd edition of the NESR Art Foundation's artistic residency in Angola, and in 2023, he embraced a new artistic residency, this time in Morocco, organized by the Arkane association.