'Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds'
Night Café is pleased to announce Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds, a solo exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Mandy Franca. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her second show with Night Café, following her New York debut with a solo booth at Independent New York 2025.
Press Release
The exhibition brings together new works from her ongoing series On Being Light and Liquid, developed during a period of illness in which Franca was confined to her bed. While restricted in movement, she spent long hours gazing out of her window, finding solace in the passing of the clouds. Moving at their own pace, clouds resist possession and remain unbothered by the frantic rhythm of contemporary life. Their quiet defiance became a point of reflection. The contrast between their weightless drift and her own immobility brought to mind Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity. In such a condition, where traditional structures dissolve, individuals are expected to remain adaptable, mobile, and unburdened. But these expectations often mask the influence of invisible forces that shape our lives. As the world continued to move around her, Franca began to question the narrative of progress, wondering whether democracy, revolutions, and activism have truly brought us closer to equality and freedom. Instead, she found herself confronting the possibility that these ideals are illusions, obscured by systems that continue to serve neither people nor the planet.
Through a merging of mediums, printmaking, drawing, photography, and painting, Franca gives material form to these concerns. This layering reflects a fluid and unstable reality, where boundaries are constantly shifting and collapsing.
Clouds, both physical and symbolic, reappear throughout the exhibition as markers of resistance and impermanence. Their movements, shaped by unseen currents, mirror the shifting nature of power, agency, and control. Franca’s own horizontal position during her illness sharpened her awareness of verticality, recalling William Pope.L’s exploration of standing as a condition of power and autonomy. Being unable to stand, she became more attuned to the tensions between bodily limitation and the fluidity of the world outside.
Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds reflects on the collapse and exposure of global structures and the illusion of freedom in contemporary society and questions the broader, intertwined concepts of freedom and humanity in our era.
