Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds

^{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 by 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 presentation at Independent New York 2025.

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 clouds. Their weightless drift, in stark contrast to her own immobility, brought to mind Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity, a condition in which traditional structures have dissolved and individuals are expected to remain perpetually adaptable, mobile, and unburdened. This is an appearance of freedom that masks the reality of invisible control. For Franca, clouds became a site of reflection on the collapse of global structures and the illusion of freedom in contemporary society. Their constant movement, shaped by unseen forces, mirrors the shifting nature of power, agency, and control. Her own restricted mobility led her to reflect on William Pope.L’s exploration of verticality, where standing upright is not merely physical but entwined with power, autonomy, and social structures. Confined to lying horizontally, Franca became more attuned to the tensions between bodily limitation and the fluidity of the world outside. Just as clouds appear free yet are carried by invisible currents, she questions whether human freedom is similarly shaped by imperceptible structures. Are we truly unbound, or simply moving within limits we fail to recognise?

Through a merging of printmaking, drawing, photography, and painting, Franca materialises these concerns in layered works that reflect a fluid and unstable reality, where boundaries are constantly shifting and collapsing. In the monumental work on canvas, which bears the same name as the exhibition, Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds, the artist has reworked prints of clouds across four panels of different vertically elongated sizes. The act of mark-making in this work is an assertion of presence. During her period of immobility, this interest in gestural mark-making took on greater urgency, sharpening her awareness of both material and existential transience. Each mark becomesan attempt to grasp something within an increasingly fluid and ungraspable world, a way to assert personal existence in the face of impermanence. Like the monumental painting, the Cloud Piece works begin with photographs of clouds printed on canvas, which are then reworked with oil pastel, oil stick, soft pastel, and china marker. Each painting measures 30 by 60 centimetres and continues Franca’s practice of layering photographic imagery with gestural mark-making. The title Cloud Piece refers to Yoko Ono’s 1963 spring ‘Instruction Painting’ with the same title, which reads, “Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.” This instruction and the format of Ono’s work were significant influences during the creation of this series.

The influence of Robert Ryman is also relevant here, particularly his approach to surface and materiality. Like Ryman’s work, Franca’s Cloud Piece paintings explore subtle layering and texture, using a restrained palette to emphasise the physical presence of the materials themselves. The Untitled series of works incorporate dates and numbers in their titles. In the photographic works on textile, the date refers to the exact day the image was captured. In the black oil stick and oil pastel works on textile, it indicates the day the work was made, acting as a record of the artist’s presence and traces within the work.

The physical arrangement of the works in the exhibition space furthers the thematic engagement with clouds and fluidity. The elongated, vertical panels are positioned with deliberate irregularity, layered one above another with white space in between, evoking the ephemeral, shifting contours of cloud formations drifting across the sky. This spatial composition reinforces the sense of levitation and instability central to the series, immersing the viewer in an environment that mirrors the unpredictability and impermanence of both natural phenomena and contemporary existence.

Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds probes the intertwined concepts of freedom and humanity in our era, exposing the fragility of global structures and challenging the illusions that govern contemporary society.}

^{Installation view: Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds, Night Café, London.

Image credits: photographs by Vinx, 2025}

^{Why Do I Stare at the Sky and Long for the Clouds

Inkjet, acrylic, oil pastel, oil stick, paint stick, china marker on canvas

Four panels 200 x 30 cm, 200 x 140 cm, 200 x 90 cm, 200 x 140 cm | 200 x 400 cm total

2025}