SAO PAULO.- In Verônica, Daniel Senise assembles three different bodies of images: large formats made from surface monotypes—transfers of faded walls, scattered with traces of passing time—in which the emblematic interiors of great museums are shown, often with their works erased; a set of works made with a similar technique, where several images of shrouds are also reproduced as mural ruins; and finally, photographic enlargement of masterpieces, derelict reproductions, eroded by time and elements, extracted from slides that accompanied old art history books.
It is, therefore, an ambitious reflection on the place of the image—and also on the place of painting—which is consistent with the work that Senise has produced in recent years.
Images have (or have had) many places. Today, for example, one may believe that its place is virtual, digital, within the jungle of applications, the world wide web, and its social media and, therefore, one can also think that the place of the image continues to be, perhaps more than ever, a coordinate of disappearance: erasure by multiplication, death by saturation.
Another place for the image is that of the old muses: the museum, as well as the (old) art history books that contained a bonus set of slides featuring the images discussed in the texts. These books carried the portable and projectable image with them.
Let’s return to the museum, in the way that Senise (barely) lets us see it: these paintings are, in their white gravity, representations of quasi-sacred spaces, in which Daniel Senise shows us his repertoire of museums, seemingly touched by a certain nostalgia. The works of Daniel Senise may suggest that perhaps the time has come to undertake a recapitulation of what the museum, art, and the place of images have been.
Together with these impressive friezes where the images—the image of the museum—slowly, lyrically, like music, distance themselves from their place, Senise has produced another series of frieze-paintings, of walls where the mural epidermis reveals the faded image, the illustrious white stain of the famous Veronica, the Vera Icona.
Yet in Senise’s work, just like paintings are erased from the museum, or reduced to white against white, in the Veronicas only the cloth remains, which is also white, where the now faded face of Christ used to be.
It can be argued that the first image, the pillar image, or matrix of all images, is the veil stained with the face of Christ, beloved for centuries and incessantly reproduced and envied by kings and priests. It is an image made without the intervention of a human hand and is a powerful relic, thaumaturgical, miraculous, healing, apotropaic, at least within the context of Christian iconology. Its effect as the pillar or matrix image even reached Malevich, whose black square evokes the image’s cultural place.
Prodigiously, Senise has represented his Veronicas as peeling and crumbling walls, as fading friezes. Thus, painting activates its emerging potency and offers survival to the oldest—and forgotten—time, from which this archetypal image proceeds. Because the prodigious image, created without the intervention of the human hand, was also in its oldest tale and in its legendary origin, an image on a wall, a stain on a frieze; the story says that having been sent by Christ himself to heal King Adgar, it was preserved like a treasure, buried within walls, whose thickness it then traversed imprinting itself on the mural epidermis. And this is precisely how Daniel Senise represents it in his recent works.
It can be thought that the exhibition unites both of the image’s places—the enclosure of the muses, the museum, and the archetype of the absolute image, either visible or invisible. Perhaps, what this set of extraordinary works comes to suggest, and is confirmed by the enlarged reproductions of works devoured by time in those slides, in another portable coordinate, the image carrier—the book of its history—, is that the place of the image is nothing more than the abyss of its loss, the strength with which it resists fading through time.
