PALIMPSEST

Palacio Sarmiento Gallery | Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology | 2018

The works of Leonel Luna dialogue with the history of art, planting relationships between the past and the contemporaneity. Using classical production as a reservoir of forms and styles, and investigating painting as an instrument of epochal representation, the artist asks questions about the relationship between art and society, the time that the authority of plastic materiality is affected by the use of of technological resources.

At first, Luna appropriated certain characters, situations or forms of classical painting to place them in the current socio-political context. In his last works, this procedure has been increasing until the heterogeneous life. Figures taken from Greco-Roman antiquity, traced poses of emblematic artistic works, interpolations of incongruous styles, images of people and events that refer to the conflicts of a daily life, according to the palms of life data.

In the realization of his works, the artist resorts to the computer programs that facilitate the configuration of the assemblies of visual fragments. The digital reality impels him, once again, to rethink the plastic materiality, the brushstrokes and the pieces, the glazes and the gestures. All this adds to the fundamental questions that are perceived behind each production: What does it mean to represent? How can art be the expression of the intricate and conflictive world that inhabits? To what extent do we who inhabit that world also find ourselves represented in an artistic work?

Rodrigo Alonso

Guest Curator