Гренада укрепляет лидерство в Карибском регионе на Венецианской биеннале-2026

One of the rewards of Grenada’s participation with a pavilion at Biennale di Venezia is to realise a network within the art world of curators, critics, and artists from all over the world. One such person we found is in the person of Valentina Minniti, an emerging art critic. Her work in writing helps to add another link in the ever-spreading net of influence for Grenada’s art, both in the region and internationally. This 9th time for Grenada has proven very advantageous, sealing our privilege of being the leader in the Caribbean as far as appearances. The inclusion of an artist from Trinidad, Edward Bowen, has broadened our scope. The pavilion was opened in May, and will continue until 22 November, a good long run for Grenada in the heart of Europe. — Susan Mains, Commissioner, Grenada Pavilion by Valentina Minniti Among the artists featured in the Grenada Pavilion, curated by Daniele Radini Tedeschi for the 2026 Biennale di Venezia, Edward Bowen offers one of the exhibition’s most intimate reflections on the notion of Baudelairean correspondences[1]. His painting, A Walk in the Park with Doctor Bob, resonates profoundly with the pavilion’s invitation to look beyond appearances in order to discover the visible and invisible relationships that bind individuals to one another, but above all to memory, nature, and the realm of emotions. By establishing a poignant dialogue between lived experience and artistic creation, the work reveals its remarkable subtlety as a landscape of memory, in which the symbolism of colour unveils the spiritual correspondences that animate nature. Despite appearing to belong to the tradition of landscape painting, the scene the painting recreates functions less as a subject than as a pretext. Inspired by “my experience in the last 4 years with my good friend walking in the botanical gardens in Port of Spain, Trinidad,” as Bowen explained, the artist did not depict a garden so much as the experience of walking through one: instead of recounting a sequence of events, the artist opted for a stream of consciousness rendered through expressive brushwork as well as an interplay between recognisable forms and their gradual transfiguration into living presences. Indeed, the logic of Proustian memory is already contained in the title itself: “the walk” is at once singular and cumulative, condensing countless walks into a single reimagined image. Memory reshapes events, allowing different moments to converge towards an intermediate space where biography and imagination become inseparable: lived experience becomes pictorial memory. The transformation of lived encounters into a multilayered painted scenario also concerns the visual language through which Bowen constructs the landscape. If the underlying drawing establishes the architecture of a space, painting loosens that structure, allowing gesture and colour to emerge as the primary media through which memory acquires a commanding visual presence: saturated reds, incandescent pinks, luminous blues, and deep greens resist descriptive naturalism. A crimson tree anchors the composition like a totemic presence, while cascades of vivid pink foliage hover between vegetation and apparition. A dense band of blue suggests water, yet its painterly treatment dissolves any straightforward illusion of depth: while the landscape remains recognisable — trees, meadow, water, sky — its physical coherence yields to an emotional logic. Colour no longer describes the world; it remembers it and translates remembrance into chromatic perception. Such a liberation of colour from a merely descriptive function reveals a deeper interpretative dimension. Indeed, the painting recalls the sensibility of magical realism, understood not merely as the intrusion of the supernatural into ordinary reality, but rather as a mode of perception capable of revealing the extraordinary already latent within everyday experience: familiar natural elements are arranged into a world where visible reality and invisible emotions coexist without contradiction. The result is a landscape animated by animistic presences, with nature no longer functioning as a passive backdrop but as an active participant in the walker’s experience. The walk itself thus gradually acquires a spiritual dimension, deepening the relationship between the individual’s perception and the surrounding world towards a heightened state of sensitivity. Ultimately, much as in the Caribbean landscapes described by George Lamming, Jean Rhys, and Derek Walcott, the botanical garden in A Walk into the Park with Doctor Bob is both geographical and spiritual, a place where the visible world opens onto unseen dimensions of experience through its bright and vibrant colours. It is here that Baudelaire’s poem Correspondences offers perhaps the most illuminating parallel for the interpretation of Bowen’s piece: the painting invites viewers to experience Nature as “a temple”[2] where “groves of symbols/2 unfold, while images, colours, and sensations respond to one another, expanding towards “dimensions infinitely vast”2. [1] Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 19. [2] Ibid., 19. Valentina Minniti is an emerging Italian art critic and curator. Her academic background combines studies in modern literature, literary criticism, communication, and fine arts. From 2022 to 2024, she was a lecturer in English for Arts and Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Reggio Calabria, before focusing her work on art criticism and curatorial projects. She currently collaborates with Start Group Srl to present and promote artists internationally. Her critical approach is rooted in the close observation of artworks as material objects, with particular attention to traditional artistic techniques, creative processes, and visual languages. Considering each artwork as a complex structure composed of materials, pigments, textures, and mixed media, Minniti investigates the physical qualities of an image as a starting point for uncovering broader interpretative possibilities, including artistic references, symbolic connections, and subtle psychological meanings.