CCC's Street Art Contest #296 "The Reading" - Mariana Duarte Santos - Bairro 2 de Maio, Lisboa – Portugal

Good afternoon, friends!

Welcome to another post in the Street Art community!

Today I’m sharing another fantastic piece of art located on one of the streets very close to where I work. Two weeks ago, I happened to walk through a neighborhood near my workplace and came across these two pieces (link @xrayman/cccs-street-art-contest-292-the-inevitable-hourglass-regg-salgado-ajuda-portugal" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">1, and @xrayman/cccs-street-art-contest-295-an-opening-in-a-sea-of-marble-regg-salgado-ajuda-portugal" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2). But when I pinned the post, I noticed other murals right in the vicinity, and since I already knew which buildings they were on, I went back to visit the area.

Very close to the @xrayman/cccs-street-art-contest-295-an-opening-in-a-sea-of-marble-regg-salgado-ajuda-portugal" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">mural I shared last week, I found this one created by Mariana Duarte Santos.

The artist, who was born in 1995 in Lisbon and studied drawing and printmaking in college, already has an extensive portfolio of works spread across several countries, including Portugal, Spain, the USA, Ireland, and the UK.

She began her career as a muralist in 2019 with her first large-scale outdoor mural, and currently has a portfolio of over 50 works!

Her work focuses primarily on stories of communities, local histories, and archival or historical images, to which the artist offers her own interpretation or a fresh, more modern perspective.

This is the case in the work I’m sharing with you today.

Titled “The Reading,” it is inspired by a painting created in 1955 by Abel Manta, in which a group of people associated with Professor Francisco Pulido Valente’s clinic depicts the daily routine of that practice.

!Panting capture

^{source: https://museudelisboa.pt/en/events/2939-artwork-focus-reading-abel-manta/}

In this mural version painted by Mariana, she used children from local communities who attend an after-school program—created and run by neighborhood women who volunteer to help them overcome integration and inclusion challenges—as her subjects, demonstrating to the community how something truly valuable can emerge from this group.

The original painting celebrated the highly productive atmosphere that existed in the office of the eminent doctor, who was later honored, and it conveys that idea and inherent potential to this group of children who spend part of their day with others.

Do we have the luxury today of finding healthy environments that are recognized as breeding grounds for ideas and movements? Do we focus only on what social media shows us, and fail to be captivated by the presence of others?

I confess that when I saw this mural, I was far from thinking it was an allusion to a painter’s work, but rather something more superficial, like a “critique” of the centralization of social media and its role in the small friendship groups among young people. But fortunately, I was completely wrong!

And you, what did you think of this work? 😁