Drawing on traditional craft techniques and the material culture of her Malagasy heritage, Richianny Ratovo developed her very own aesthetic language that expands principles of classic painting and photography. She works with a wide range of materials, such as leather, glass, or cork, and transforms her mediums with a great joy in experimentation and sensibility to their distinctive material quality. She combines drawing and painting techniques with sculptural methods such as etching and pyrography, exploring notions of presence and absence, place and time, and thus memory in a poetic yet material-driven way.

For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, she has created a new

body of work that builds on her previous abstract paint-
ings on gate-sized glass panels that were suspended from

the ceiling in the exhibition space. The new series’ title is Antsoantso (2025), which means “call” in Malagasy – a strong and firm but friendly invitation that we want to listen and hold on to when everything else around us feels uncertain; a voice that serves as a personal guide. In Antsoantso, each canvas stands for the silent conversation between us and the world, between what we hold on to and what we let go of – like the breath, memories, or the changing of the seasons. For these new pieces, Ratovo experimented with algae-based paper and natural fibres, combining textile and painting techniques with engraving. Just like her previous works on glass, also here the panels are suspended from the ceiling and thus allow the natural light and the shadows of people walking by to shine through, reflecting on the delicate balance between materiality and lightness, permanence and impermanence, reflection and transparency.