Languana

A training built studio by studio

Aldino Dinis Languana — Languana — was born in Maputo on 20 February 1972. He began drawing to pass the time, and that is where the career started. In 1990–91 he took his first training at the Atelier Arco-íris under the master Noel Langa. Years of successive apprenticeship followed, in the studios of Vítor Sousa, Neto, Carlos Martins, Massunga, João Tinga and Samate — five years with the first, ten with Carlos Martins — a studio-to-studio path that gave him an unusual command of painting across media.

He read Social Sciences at the Universidade Aberta in Lisbon, graduating in 2007, and in the same year took the watercolour, acrylic and oil painting course taught by professor Ulisses at the Escola Eugénio de Lemos — the same Ulisses Oviedo who signs lots 23 to 28 in this sale. Aquarell auf Papier became his own language: saturated colour, the water left to decide part of the drawing, figures emerging from the wash. He also works as a film producer and director, on works such as Timbila e Marimba Chope.

He has shown solo since 2000 — Compasso a Dois and Emoções at the Brazilian Study Centre in Maputo, Tsomba at the Casarão das Artes in Belo Horizonte and at the Aquino Café in Maputo, Conversando com o Silêncio in 2023 and Jardins de Sonhos in 2024, his seventh solo show. Group exhibitions include the Linha Aberta project and the National Art Museum Annual, the TDM Biennial, the CFM centenary and Mozambican Art in Cuba. He received an Honourable Mention and Second Prize in the Descoberta competition, and runs watercolour workshops in municipal schools in Belo Horizonte and talks in Maputo. On 28 September 2024 he was elected president of the Núcleo de Arte association — the century-old body that brings together Mozambique's visual artists — for a two-year term.