Smile . Follow Your Dreams by Diogo Landô
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Mix-media on Acrylic Box
Dimensions: 40 x 40 cm
Year: 2024
Price: $1200.00 USD
Status: available
Smile. Follow Your Dreams Mixed media in Acrylic Box 40x40x8cm Original 1 of 1 +IMAGES - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-5m0Sc8kP3DPvOucKLLU0_RumLj1ro4J/view?usp=drive_link Smile. Follow Your Dreams plays with the tension between optimism and erosion, between the immediacy of a slogan and the complexity that lies beneath it. At first glance, the work presents a familiar smile. Iconic, inviting, almost comforting. Yet this apparent simplicity quickly fractures into layers of wear, interruption, and visual noise. The smiling face emerges through torn surfaces, scraped textures, and overlapping fragments. Eyes and mouth appear partially revealed, partially concealed, suggesting a presence that is never fully accessible. The smile, rather than offering certainty, becomes ambiguous—hovering between sincerity and mask, encouragement and obligation. Urban elements, traces of typography, and distressed materials evoke the language of the street: consumed walls, faded posters, messages repeated until they lose clarity. The phrase Follow Your Dreams resonates as both promise and pressure, an echo of contemporary mantras that persist even as surfaces decay and meanings shift. The circular form functions as a frame and a boundary, containing the image while isolating it from its surroundings. Encased within this structure, the smile feels suspended in time, protected, yet exposed. The work invites the viewer to question what remains of these messages once they are worn down, fragmented, and reassembled. Smile. Follow Your Dreams does not reject optimism; instead, it examines it closely. It asks whether hope survives repetition, whether joy can persist through erosion, and how much of ourselves we reveal when we are asked, constantly, to smile.
Why collect this work?
A familiar smiley is rebuilt from facial fragments and then heavily interrupted, turning a simple emblem of cheerfulness into an uncertain social command.
- Landô describes fragmentation, layering and contradiction as central to his practice. Here, those concerns focus the work on the gap between an upbeat symbol and a face that remains only partly accessible.
- Within the circular outline, blue eyes and red lips appear through broad white gaps, while broken lettering sits at the edge. The image can be recognised immediately, but its human expression cannot be read with equal certainty.
- Catalogued as mixed media in an acrylic box, the work combines photographic imagery, typography and painted or printed-looking interruptions. Its documented 8 cm depth may give the layered image a physical boundary, though this photograph cannot establish the box’s spatial effect.
- Encountering this work places the visual shorthand of the smiley beside the fragmented slogan “Follow Your Dreams,” making it useful for considering how encouragement can shift into pressure when repeated as a public message.
About the Artist
Diogo Landô
Diogo Landô is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: mixed-media. Based in Oliveira de Azeméis.
Nationality: Portuguese
My work begins with emotion! An impulse born from a continuous need to create.
