Artists We Love: Ricardo Pinto Jorge

WORDS Malibongwe Tylio

The work of Mozambican visual artist Ricardo Pinto Jorge spans painting, video, photography and kaleidoscopic images filled with nostalgia for the Maputo architecture of his youth.

“Ironically,” says artist and airline pilot Ricardo Pinto Jorge, “flying keeps me grounded.” The 29-year-old has been a commercial pilot for five years, but he has been an artist for a great deal longer.

“As a child I would record my favourite cartoons and then replay them, pressing pause and tracing images straight from the TV screen.”

His most recent exhibition, Bits of Maputo, is “an audio-visual project that includes a soundtrack by some of Maputo’s finest musicians and a catalogue of a wide array of texts by a diverse set of people”.

This kaleidoscopic series of photographic and video works inspired by his childhood memories of Maputo architecture surged organically, says Ricardo. “I never meant for Bits Of Maputo to be a project until a very close friend suggested it.”

As a child, Ricardo would lie in the back of his parents’ car as they drove through the city, from where he could see the tops of buildings. A few years ago, he began taking pictures of the tops of Maputo buildings using his cellphone camera. “After a while I had more than 200 photos with recurrent framing and composition, so I started looking into what I could do to get more out of these photos.”

That’s when he started using apps to manipulate the images, eventually creating kaleidoscopes. “I realised what I was doing was an attempt to revisit the sensations and feelings I had when I was a kid inside my parents’ car, and the kaleidoscopes had that effect.”

Fast-forward to 2017, and Ricardo revisited the same buildings armed with a professional camera and an understanding of editing software beyond those initial cellphone apps, and so Bits of Maputo was born.

Follow Ricardo on Instagram to keep up to date with his work.