OF MEN AND GIANTS: THE DREAMS OF HISTORY OF ELISABETTA FARNESE

Davide Cantoni’s burned drawings in dialogue with the Farnese Colletion Davide Cantoni’s artistic practice has focused over the years on the way our society presents images and how they are consumed. Cantoni’s particular interest is in relation to news imagery published in the New York Times (DC has lived and worked in NYC since 1996). Using newspapers photography as a starting point, the artist hints at a loss of active memory. In reality the images seen, or at least glanced, at by millions of eyes, are destined to be forgotten, but they are also deposited in a communal subconscious memory. As with all his work Cantoni is asking the viewer to look again, refocus, become active in seeing. Mimicking the photographic process the artist makes his burned works by focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass onto the graphite in his drawings. Cantoni’s works, which could be described as Contemporary Archeology, are on display with the real giants of history. While our news cycle lasts for a maximum of 24 hours, the sculptures of the Farnese collection have been with us and overlooked our human travails for more than 2 millennia. Cantoni works in the hope of making the images he creates more lasting, placing them beyond the 24 hour news cycle and a little closer to the timelessness of the Farnese collection.