Resumen

 The purpose of this article is to discuss a biographical film produced in Cape Verde (2022). It aims to expose the work of creation and artistic research carried out by its protagonist, the late Cape Verdean painter Dudu Rodrigues (DR), and to prove its extrinsic relationship with a certain line of academic-scientific research that emerged at the beginning of the 21st century.

It turned out that the peak of DR’s artistic work, in the year of his suicide in 2014, coincided with the so-called “sensory turn”: a new line of research in the fields of anthropology, neurology and culture that gives due importance to the multi-sensory experience, both in terms of the perception of reality and in terms of artistic enjoyment. It contrasts with a certain artistic and cultural mentality that privileges the sense of sight and that has served as the basis for museum practice since the 18th century.

Specifically, the article explores the fact that the versatile artist questioned the primacy of the sense of sight while, in the academic world, research and investigations of this nature were being carried out by renowned researchers. Ultimately, the article aims to prove that the artist’s act of suicide (portrayed in the film) is the tragic culmination of an arduous work process in which he explored life and the search for meaning in art, by the most radical and extreme way imaginable.