The National Museum of Fine Arts opens next Thursday at 7 p.m. the exhibition “Panorama. The theater of memory” by Daniel Santoro, in which the artist presents his unpublished work spread over 30 meters, in addition to a selection of works in ink on paper, sketches and notebooks, and a charcoal drawing made especially for this exhibition on one of the walls of room 42, on the second floor of the Museum.
Santoro tells about the works that he will exhibit at the Bellas Artes: “With this work, I try to provoke an immersive experience similar to that of those panoramas of the late 19th century. But, in this case, the spectacle shown is a timeline broken by a succession of signs of crises and collapses that announce the possible endings of this time.”
The panorama – which extends along room 42 on the second floor, covering an angle of three hundred degrees – presents a sequence of images made in charcoal and diluted acrylic. “I decided to use the material trace of the drawing and avoid the rhetorical artifice of painting, which resulted in a bichrome of brown colors with pigments from the earth and charcoal,” details Santoro.
“The pictorial panoramas, popular in the 19th century, were enormous circular murals that evoked transcendent events of the past, such as wars, natural disasters and historical episodes,” explained the director of the Fine Arts, Andrés Duprat about the format adopted by the exhibition. ” They were realistic paintings that sought to emulate credible scenes: they were, in some way, a precursor to cinema.”
“In this exhibition, Santoro rescues that format by presenting a panorama of thirty linear meters. Although he respects the formal aspect, the artist makes significant conceptual changes. In principle, it is not about the representation of a historical fact, but about the staging of a personal and dystopian worldview in which the artist expresses his concerns and his critical vision of reality,” defines Duprat.
“With lucidity and poetry, Santoro proposes keys to reading past, present and future history through a raw social portrait of our aspirations, achievements and failures,” defines Duprat.
“The artist shows an apocalyptic world, in which we recognize multiple references to different moments in the history of humanity, and in which an emergency situation is sensed. The big question the exhibition raises could be: where are we going? However, these works perhaps function as a hopeful warning that asks us: what can we do to correct the course?” reflects the director of the Fine Arts.
The exhibition is completed with what Santoro calls the “theater of memory”, made up of a file that presents a sequence of miniature images, as well as a series of drawings in ink and charcoal, sketches, notes and artist books that reveal the genesis of the creation, the ideas and the previous studies of his recent productions.
“In this set, the problem of representing the dynamics of time, the vector, the successive, the capture of memory is posed,” Santoro comments. I thought of a kind of rotating file of images, but with a displacement on its axis that turns that movement into a spiral that folds on itself and generates a multilayer of intimate memories, of events, events that make up a true theater of memory. ”.
“Daniel Santoro: Panorama. The theater of memory” can be visited until November 19, 2023 in room 42 on the second floor of the Museum, from Tuesday to Friday, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and on Saturdays and Sundays, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., with free admission and free.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
