By Vannie Gama
In theory, you would be reading the text of the week as being about the first exhibition that I participated in here in Montréal (the first of the year as well), but a specific urgency took precedence: the Winter Olympics in Cortina, Italy. Now, in a year as significant for solidarity between countries and global diplomacy as 2026. It is curious how in the middle of the event, there is already a thought surrounding my mind: What will the international community look like in 2030? Honestly, what matters is that if Beijing 2022 was so important to take place in that late‑Covid‑19 context, the 2026 Winter Olympics are also an Olympics woven into collective tensions. For that reason, I decided to write a trilogy of texts about culture of Sports and the Arts within a social context, instead of simply sharing my sketches of my favorite Winter Olympics sport, figure skating.
On a more personal note, during the Olympics, my favorite sport in general is artistic gymnastics. If you are familiar with my artistic work, you have probably already noticed the strong presence, over the years, of ballet in symbolist and surrealist paintings from the last, well, nine years. Naturally, it is the same bodily skill that makes artistic gymnastics one of the best elements for those already familiar with dance, and especially in women’s gymnastics, historically, the changes have been enormous. In a 21st‑century context where the discipline is, fortunately, increasingly concerned with the technical athletic quality of gymnasts, it is moving toward gender equality in gymnastics compared to the previous century: athletes with the muscle mass needed to sustain unprecedented performances, where the dance element in artistic gymnastics has become less central, yet still connected to the sport of gymnastics as a whole.
At the Winter Olympics, however, figure skating is that sport which, like gymnastics, brings together elements of gymnastics and dance, mediated by skating and by the medium of ice. Living in Canada, it is impossible not to let myself be completely absorbed by the sport in my own visual artistic practice. In the next three texts, I will share with you sketches and drawings (I won’t have time to make actual paintings, but who knows, maybe some elements will end up “leaking” into a future series), while also developing historical aspects of the sport, reflections on high performance in culture by creating a dialogue between sports and the arts, and finally, discussing the geopolitical importance of the Olympics, historically as well. I will weave the texts with personal comments on the results, if that seems interesting and relevant, or simply to honor the athletes.
The board below, of course, was recorded with all the cheesiness of “practical effects,” meaning light play between my glass desk and the sheet of this first sketch. This is a set of scribbles using 8B and 3B graphite pencils (the only ones I can use) on a comfortable A2‑sized paper. Since this is the “zero” sharing, the next ones I intend to make with soft pastel and ink. The “sketch” quality comes from the absence of corrections and the free use of the pencil, without erasing wrong lines, but allowing the movement of the athletes, as in ballet, to stand out in relation to the elements per se, where the unity, the symbolic structure, lies in the “strength” of dynamism, and again, not in the details that could even remove that same sense of temporality.
For now, undeniably and urgently, I have to say that Kaori Sakamoto is my favorite, as the genius of the competition. In sequence, the pair Sui and Han, and, finally, Siao Him Fa, who holds, for me particularly, today, as I write this, 11th February 2026, the most authentic and present (so to speak, the best) program of the Cortina Winter Olympics.
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