Canvas Adrift: Vamona Navelcar, Artist of the Unframed Ocean

Abstract:Born in Portuguese Goa in 1929, trained in art in metropolitan Portugal while the empire was being decolonized in the 1960s, and then exiled in postcolonial Mozambique in the 1970s, Vamona Navelcar became an artist of three continents not solely by choice. Even as his work chronicles these diverse locations, these very transits have made Navelcar's legacy verge on disappearance. As this article argues, it is the politics of nationalism at the three continental sites that constitute Navelcar's life cartography that has defined this artist's trajectory and obscured his oeuvre. Although Navelcar's life and artistic connections across the Lusophonic Indian Ocean world demonstrate its multiplicities and convergences, it is the fixity of nation(s) that has undermined the complexity of such heritage and the artist's legacy.