For the past 5 months, the Grenada Pavilion has been open at the prestigious Biennale di Venezia, the most outstanding art show in the world. It has been the privilege of Grenada to host an artist from another island, to further reconnect the Caribbean as one entity. Art critic Valentina Minitti writes about the piece from Russell Watson. The exhibition continues through 22 November. — Susan Mains, Commissioner, Grenada Pavilion
by Valentina Minitti
Featured within the official Grenada Pavilion, curated by Daniele Radini Tedeschi for the 2026 Venice Biennale, Russell Watson’s digital installation, BG4202301 1M-A/BG4202301 1M-B, offers a particularly compelling meditation on the pavilion’s poetics of correspondence between the human senses and the surrounding natural world.
A multidisciplinary artist from Barbados, Watson has long explored the relationship between the human body, Caribbean ecologies, and metaphorical transformation, recreating visual conditions in which perception hovers between subtle sensation and apparent representation. The installation currently displayed in Venice exemplifies such an approach through mirroring and evocative sensory correspondences with the sea, privileging perceptual suggestions of underwater immersion over conventional modes of realistic representation.
At first glance, viewers are drawn into the visual reciprocity established by the two silent figures. Rather than being mere reflections of one another, they seem to answer one another across the space between the screens: as the soft streams of bubbles emerging from their mouths slowly converge, meaning arises through symmetry and, above all, through a sense of reciprocal presence and inner resonance.
At the same time, an almost palpable sense of water emerges through the interplay of light effects, aquatic elements, and a reconstructed marine soundscape. The shimmer of the sea surface across the bodies and the gradual deepening of blue in the background suggest a descent towards the depths of the Caribbean Sea. The coral formations covering the figures’ eyes further intensify the immersive effect, suspending vision in favour of the other senses. The underwater sound dimension, in turn, extends the illusion beyond the visual field, reinforcing the sensation of being surrounded by water even in its absence.
Taken as a whole, the installation reconstructs the Caribbean Sea not as an object of representation, but as a sensation. Indeed, the perceptual logic of the work can be read through the lens of magical realism, yet the extraordinary emerges not through the intrusion of the supernatural, but through the subtle displacement of ordinary perceptual expectations. The work consequently occupies an intermediate territory between representation and sensation, where digital illusion becomes a means of making the absent almost tangible.
It is precisely here that the visual and auditory elements give form to the pavilion’s poetics of correspondences: if blue evokes depth, shimmer recalls the movement of the sea surface; if coral formations evoke the marine ecosystem, bubbles suggest breath and suspension; and the gradual darkening of blue accompanies the imagined progression into deeper waters. In their interplay, human figures, colour, light, and sound seem to answer one another, making the sensory presence of the Caribbean Sea almost palpable.
Valentina Miniti is an emerging Italian art critic and curator. Her academic background combines studies in modern literature, literary criticism, communication, and fine arts. From 2022 to 2024, she was a lecturer in English for Arts and Communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Reggio Calabria, before focusing her work on art criticism and curatorial projects. She currently collaborates with Start Group Srl to present and promote artists internationally.
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