Dialogues with Da Vinci

On Immortality of signs: Da Vinci in Contemporary Art
Why would a group of contemporary artists choose the work of Leonardo da Vinci and therefore Renaissance art as an object of reflection for their present exhibition?
The truth is that the exegesis of art by art itself is not a new procedure. It was above all the modernist movement with bigger vigor that turned the scope to the cradle of arts that the Renaissance was. And did so to free itself from it. In order to find the very object of each one of visual arts, modernism had to deconstruct its own roots, with an emphasis on the deconstruction of Renaissance illusionism, because it gave them objects outside themselves.
Contemporary art has very diverse purposes when retaking its own historical fundamentals and its founding fathers’ works. Perhaps it was Robert Rauschenberg, with Persimmon (1964), who best defined the conceptual reach of postmodern commentary style in contemporary painting. Reproducing directly the “Venus in the Bath” by Rubens, Rauschenberg showed that the privileged object of art was art itself and not something extrinsic to it.
The present exhibition of São Paulo Business Center’s Cultural Space is a brilliant exercise of this kind of reflection on the fundamentals, on the languages and on the basic signs of the visual arts in particular and of Western culture in general, addressed through the current languages and technologies. Both applied to explain, decode and re-signify the archetypes that constitute and inform us.

Artwork Description:
“In Vicencia Gonsales’ translation, The Annunciation becomes a woven web of luminous threads, conductors of lights and reflections, they themselves structuring voids and projected shadows. A work built by the projection of light on almost immaterial forms, woven with strings of lyricism and femininity.”
Antonio Carlos Fortis
(Anthropologist)

Data sheet:
Name: "Lines of Grace"
Technique: installation with wire threads.
Dimensions (approximate): 100 x 100 x 5 cm
Reference work: painting "The annunciation" (Leonardo Da Vinci - 1474)