ArtNow
r e p o r t
Edition 12
Edition 12
Edition 12
July
July
July 2026
2026
2026
Edition 12
July 2026
ArtNow Report
Art in All Its Forms
Cinema never stopped painting
Painting
Cinema
Design
Photography
The Same Screen
Salvador Dalí
Dalí, Warhol, Lynch, Kurosawa:
when trading the paintbrush for
the camera isn't changing art—
it's continuing it.
Art history likes to keep painting and cinema in separate rooms—one is
ancient, contemplative, hanging on a wall; the other is modern, restless,
unfolding in the dark. Yet some artists walked through the door between
those two rooms, not as a metaphor but in the most literal sense: they
put down the paintbrush, picked up a camera, and discovered they
hadn't abandoned one art for another. They had simply continued the
same one, through different means.
Salvador Dalí and Buñuel
The first to cross over were those who needed images to dream. Painting
could suggest delirium, but it could never let it unfold—and it was in search of
that flow that Salvador Dalí turned to cinema. In 1929, alongside Buñuel, he
opened Un Chien Andalou with a razor slicing through an eye: an image no
still canvas could contain, now set in motion. Years later, Hollywood invited
him to design the dream sequence for Hitchcock's Spellbound. Hitchcock
rejected the hazy, conventional dream imagery of the time; he wanted
nightmares sharper than the film itself. Dalí was chosen precisely because of
the hallucinatory precision he had already mastered on canvas. For him,
filmmaking was simply allowing the painting to dream out loud.
The opposite impulse also found its way into cinema. Rather than setting the
image in motion, Andy Warhol forced it to remain still—and turned time itself
into the subject. Sleep (1963) follows a man sleeping for more than five hours;
Empire, released the following year, fixes its unblinking camera on the façade
of the Empire State Building for eight hours. The Pop artist pointed his lens at
the stillest thing he could find and simply waited. Painting had always done
something similar: offering a motionless image that each viewer explores at
their own pace. Warhol merely returned that stillness to cinema, discovering
that duration, stretched far beyond comfort, could become a form in itself. At
the premiere of Sleep, only nine people attended—and two of them walked
out within the first hour.
Andy Warhol
But the deepest crossing belonged not to those who merely visited
cinema—it belonged to those who moved into it for good, without
ever handing back the keys to painting. David Lynch trained as a
painter and often said he became a filmmaker because of a single
moment in front of one of his own canvases. He was painting a dark
garden when he imagined the plants beginning to move and heard
the sound of wind rising from the image. "A moving painting," he
thought—and he spent the rest of his life pursuing that vision. He
never abandoned the paintbrush. Instead, he made films as though
the principles of painting still applied to the screen, insisting that a
movie was nothing more than a painting that had learned to move
and make sound.
Others made the same journey and carried it just as far. Julian
Schnabel, known for his monumental paintings built from shattered
plates, turned to directing and went on to win the Best Director
Award at Cannes. He often said everything began with the collision
of two artistic experiences: the light of a Rembrandt painting he
encountered in a museum at the age of ten and the grandeur of a
Hollywood epic he saw that very same day—both absorbed by the
same child, becoming inseparable. Steve McQueen traveled the
path from the white walls of the gallery to the darkness of the movie
theater. He won the Turner Prize, Britain's highest honor in
contemporary art, and years later the Academy Award for Best
Picture—the only artist to have received both. Yet even now, he
continues to describe himself first and foremost as an artist.
Julian Schnabel
And then the river flows back again, proving it was
always the same river. Akira Kurosawa dreamed of
becoming a painter long before he became a
filmmaker—and, in truth, he never stopped being
one. During the long wait to secure financing for
Kagemusha, he returned to the easel and created
hundreds of paintings, with every shot of the film
existing first as pigment on paper before becoming
light on the screen.
He continued to paint every frame of Ran and
Dreams by hand, the latter recreating the world of
Van Gogh with the devotion of a true believer. He
didn't paint to become a better painter; he painted
to see the film before he ever shot it. The camera
became his brush, and the world his canvas.
In the end, asking where painting ends and cinema
begins may be the wrong question altogether.
These artists never crossed from one art form into
another. They crossed into the place where the two
had never truly been separate—where stopping
time and setting it in motion are expressions of the
same longing, and where the brush and the lens
are simply extensions of the same hand.
A painter who picks up a camera leaves nothing
behind. They simply discover that the canvas—and
the
screen—have
always
shared
the
same
language.
I n t h e e n d , t h e
b r u s h a n d t h e
l e n s w e r e n e v e r
t w o d i f f e r e n t
t o o l s
—
t h e y w e r e t h e
s a m e h a n d ,
s e a r c h i n g f o r t h e
s a m e i m a g e
a c r o s s d i f f e r e n t
s u r f a c e s .
MASTHEAD
ISSUE 12
CINEMA SPECIAL
A magazine dedicated to contemporary art in
all its forms and expressions, featuring
emerging and established artists, exhibitions,
critical analysis and readings of the current
scene.
A quarterly digital publication in Portuguese,
English, Spanish and French.
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COVER
Amanda Medeiros · portuguese edition
Regina Picoli · international edition
Art, coffee, and reading—an
inspiring trio.
Awaken your creativity. Welcome to ArtNow Report.
Julho 2026
The Point Where
It Ends
Rostislaw Tsarenko
An image is not born from a single glance or a continuous stroke; it is built through
accumulation. In the work of Ukrainian artist Rostislaw Tsarenko, the blank space of the
paper is claimed through persistence. Each microscopic dot of ink becomes a fraction
of a second, a breath held within the tip of a fine pen. To look at his creations is to
understand that, in art, time is not a line moving toward an end, but a silent substance
that settles onto the surface of the world until it makes the invisible visible.
There is a distinctly cinematic dimension to this persistence of duration. Not because it
seeks a linear narrative, but because of the very texture of the visible. Just as the grain of
film shimmers in the darkness of a movie theater, Tsarenko’s millions of ink dots give the
apparent stillness of his drawings a hidden pulse. The frame remains fixed, yet the
substance is in motion. It is a kind of existential montage: twenty or thirty hours distilled
into a single sheet of paper, where time ceases to be an abstract idea and becomes
visible matter.
An open admirer of classical sculpture, Rostislaw Tsarenko performs a miracle that
reverses the logic of the sculptural tradition. While the Renaissance master revealed the
human form by freeing it from a solid block of marble, the Ukrainian artist constructs his
two-dimensional sculptures out of absolute emptiness. They are fictional monuments
that seem to bear the dust and erosion of centuries spent in imaginary museums. Yet
his relationship with tradition is never archaeological. Classical iconography appears as
a language rather than a quotation. Marble ceases to be a material and becomes
memory; light no longer merely reveals form but sculpts the invisible. Chiaroscuro does
more than organize volume—it shapes states of consciousness, where shadow is no
longer an absence but the very origin of mystery.
Within this rigorously monochromatic realm, the imagined stone seems to pulse with
greater vitality than flesh itself. Surrealism never emerges as spectacle or rupture, but as
the natural consequence of an inner world. Everything that is complex, spiritual, or
invisible is resolved through the elemental unity of the dot. Every image is born from the
patient repetition of an almost imperceptible gesture, until the fragment transforms
itself into wholeness.
A Royal Talens Ambassador since 2019, with works held in collections across much of Europe and
collaborations ranging from musicians to international brands—from Holly Bowling to TTSWTRS—
Tsarenko brings this same rigor to every new surface. Perhaps that is why the title of his art book,
Life Begins with a Dot, the Point Where It Ends, reads less like a metaphor and more like an artistic
manifesto: between the first and the final touch of the pen lies far more than a drawing. It is the
quiet construction of an entire existence.
As we step back from the work, the dots disappear into the flawless illusion of form; as we move
closer, that form dissolves into an endless constellation of black dust. We find ourselves
suspended at the precise threshold between dissolution and recognition. What remains on the
retina is the impression of a statue that, on the verge of taking its first breath, has chosen to
remain forever in the eternal instant before movement.
Instagram: @rostislaw_ts