Forgeries in a dreamt museum
In a lost Salon that one arrives to without a path and with lost steps, there is an impressive painting show, of good painting, that seems hard to fit in today's visual art tendencies: three young argentine painters, Gabriel Lopez Santiso, Pablo D'Antoni and Julian Reboratti that have studied at the San Francisco Art Institute. The miniatures by D'Antoni extend themselves as strange narrations or fragments of a film strip. Or like those drawings by Escher that distort the subject hoping we will open the door, simulating a spy hole into a dreamt museum. Or is it, actually, dreaming a museum? Let's imagine in a miniature scale, the fusion between the masters of old Flemish painting and photo realism. Landscapes and portraits of medieval matrons coexisting with North American sinister middle class faces. A surrealistic humor is the nexus between these contrasting worlds through the break of scale in miniature, the apparition of an insect on the shoulder of a young lady, a hat that imprisons the hands. With a delightful virtuosity in the replica of old painting, D'Antoni fulfils his "forgeries" with icons and current wefts. La Gioconda has proven, since Duchamp, to be recycled in the history of Art and despite of her; the bar codes between the viewer and the painting might be a metaphor of the market.
Ana Longoni