Taming Beast (Domar de Feras): The Art of Transformation - Exhibition by Carina Mendonça

Curated by Gloria Nieto, the Art Center Caravel in Funchal features "Taming Beast" exhibition by artist Carina Mendonça. Results of a partnership between ARTE.M – Artistic and Cultural Association of Madeira and Art Center Caravel, this show represents the first project of the 2025 season of ARTHubMadeira, a creative space devoted to supporting artist of Madeira island.

Starting on February 8, 2025, at 16:30, the exhibition will be accessible to the public until April 8, 2025.

Carina Mendonça uses recyclable materials and sculpting to build symbolic animals that mirror our anxieties, egos, and inner conflicts, therefore challenging the observer to a deep contemplation on the self and society. She is self-taught and experimental.

Inspired by medieval alchemy, Carina Mendonça takes us on a transforming trip, much like the process of converting lead into gold—where ignorance becomes insight.

Visual Vision of the Artist

Who informed us that stubbornness is just that—stubbornness?

Alternatively, hate is the worst thing and there is nothing we can do about it? Absolutely the reverse! Nothing exists as a goal in of itself; at the conclusion of everything, there is always its antithesis.

Because they are the same thing, just at different degrees, we may transform stubbornness into persistence and hate into love—just as we can alter the temperature of a thermometer from cold to hot.

Seeking to convert lead into gold, medieval alchemists described this tremendous metamorphosis. Actually, however, they were describing the Lead Man's (ignorance) metamorphosis into the Gold Man's (knowledge).

This inward trip calls significant effort.

We conceal and stifle our inner "beasts," our limits, anxieties, selfishness, pride, and attachments, thereby descending into our own personal hells.

We live incomplete and false lives, distant from what we are really supposed to be as we oppose seeing and modifying them.

We have to be brave to confront them, accept their reality, and figure out their sources.

Then then will we be able to turn them into something good as they obscure our actual nature and direction.

Awareness and will have to be the lighthouse pointing us toward ever-deeper moral standards. Not in hurry or in pauses!

Carina Mendonça asks us to awaken in thought and change by means of this show, with sculptural works loaded with symbolic meaning.

There are now unveiled the "beasts". They have manifested to drive this internal conflict and conversation.

Regarding the artist

Carina Mendonça is a self-taught artist born in Funchal in 1983 who has been showing her works both solo and group since 2009. Illustration, urban interventions, painting, sculpture, and performance art comprise her creative investigation. Her art invites serious reflection on the human condition as it features terrible aspects and experiments. She produces the project "CM Art Work," therefore broadening her creative approach, concurrently.

Exhibition details 📍 Location: Art Center Caravel - D. Carlos I, Funchal 📅 February 8 – April 8, 2025 🕓 Starting: February 8 at 16:30

Carina Mendonça and her aexibition at ArtHUBMadeira