Vistamare is pleased to present Ambientale, Joana Escoval’s third solo exhibition at the gallery and her first at the Pescara venue.

The exhibition features a new body of work conceived specifically for the gallery space and never shown before.

Over the past decade, Escoval has explored practices and rituals that connect bodies and gestures with the unseen forces shaping the Earth and ourselves as part of it. Through sculpture, performance, and sound, she investigates how matter and consciousness intersect and resonate: how water holds and transmits memory; how breath and wind generate rhythms between sky and land; how shadows and vibrations can be perceived while fleeting; and how bodies attune to one another.

After relocating her studio to the Alentejo region, near the sea and immersed in the rural and wild culture of southern Portugal, Escoval has begun developing a practice rooted in this territory.

The series Ambientale started with a small-scale diptych born out of her relationship with her cat, Chuva. Larger paintings were then created, exploring the vibrations of morning light and the reverberation of wind through the olive trees. The artist crafted the paintbrushes herself, using locks of her own black hair and tufts cut from the mane of Talismã, a horse she has been training and caring for – merging tenderness, ritual, and collaboration.

Returning to painting, she describes her body responding with a sense of relaxation, profound freedom, and vitality. Each brushstroke becomes meditative and energizing – a cyclical and restorative experience that helps her adjust to the density of the world we live in.

Sound plays a central role in this: as light is visible vibration, sound is audible vibration, surrounding and bathing our bodies. By embracing listening as a core material, Escoval opens a physical and psychological space that expands and bends time.

The exhibition recognizes the energetic history of its creative process, responding simultaneously as an ally and a witness. More concerned with painting as a transfer of energy than as a visual language, Escoval continues an everyday practice of deep time through subtle fluctuations in current and flux.