PALIMPSESTS THE MEMORY

PALIMPSESTS | THE MEMORY OF IMAGES

Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center UBA | August 2023

Leonel Luna's works engage with art history by boldly establishing connections between the past and contemporaneity. By using classical production as a reservoir of forms and styles and investigating painting as an instrument of epochal representation, the artist poses questions about the relationships between art and society while challenging the authority of plastic materiality through the use of technological resources.

Initially, Luna appropriated certain characters, situations, or forms from classical painting to place them in the current socio-political context. In his latest works, this process has intensified to give life to complex compositions where heterogeneity reigns. Figures drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity, poses copied from emblematic artworks, interpolations of incongruous styles, and images of people and events that evoke conflicts close to our everyday reality form a palimpsest of multiple layers whose decipherment requires an intense reading.

In the realization of his works, the artist uses computer programs that facilitate the construction of visual montage fragments. Digital fabrication, in turn, prompts him to rethink plastic materiality, brushstrokes and pieces, veils and gestures. All of this adds to the fundamental questions perceived behind each production: What does it mean to represent? How can art capture the intricate and conflict-ridden world it inhabits? To what extent are those of us who also inhabit that world represented in an artwork?

Rodrigo Alonso

Guest Curator

The images we use to reflect our world, from the invention of digital photography to the present day, now acquire an infinite overlay of visualizations through social networks, multiplying and forming thus, inconclusive information. They are fragments of a whole and ephemeral aspects of our present, even going as far as to reinterpret images from the past.

These works that I exhibit explore this overlay and the power of images to constitute themselves and make sense to our perception, beyond their fragmentation. The visible takes shape according to the context in which we live and becomes a representation of the things we recognize.

The iconographic power of images goes beyond the notion of truth and becomes a shared illusion, a subtext that makes visible what we desire. Technology comes to our aid to complete the circle of creation and reproduction.

The author-creator, assisted and immersed in everyday life, finds himself at the crossroads between the ethical and aesthetic act. The difference lies in the dialogue of languages that allows exploring new possibilities and meanings.

Leonel Luna