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Burn Drawings

June 7, 2007- July 31, 2007

Reception: June 7, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

David Cantoni

Daneyal Mahmood Gallery

511 W 25th St

For the last five years, Cantoni's main enterprise has been to translate news photographs - quite literally, without prettification or editorializing. Even at its most expert, translation entails damage–little losses, shifts of meaning. Cantoni's process makes that damage visible. His "Burn Drawings" seem to have survived some strangely delicate conflagration–in fact, the result of Cantoni's unusual medium, sunlight directed through a magnifying glass. The surface of each drawing is tattered, singed, and frail. Often the vellum has burnt clean through, leaving irregular holes, like lacunae in antique texts.

What Cantoni does is, really, a form of "untranslation." He makes a visual lingua franca–the iconography of the New York Times–less intelligible. What had been documentary, authoritative, and institutional, becomes vulnerable, coy, and idiosyncratic. What was infinite becomes unique. Cantoni preserves the images, but he changes their qualities. One of the effects of this change is to return to us a fresh sense of the strangeness of the original event. Perhaps we remember a dead boy, stretched out on the streets of Genoa. Perhaps we can imagine the fate that awaits a somber soldier, with his Yankees cap and rocket launcher. The punctured surface of Cantoni's drawing amplifies our forebodings. But above all, it reminds us how little we know, how far away we are.

Cantoni's work belongs to a tradition of ambivalence about pictures. And yet, Cantoni makes images that seldom feel aloof. On the contrary, they have a kind of delicate earnestness, a whispered warmth. Cantoni labors with the steady attentiveness, and also the optimism, of a restorer. What is being restored is our capacity to connect, to engage, to imagine.

This exhibition includes Mr. Cantoni's new drawings including his largest to date "Luna" and his first video "Sol," an animated rotation of the sun rendered as burned drawings. Setting up Sun and Moon at either ends of the gallery Cantoni activates the space in between these two works as the stage to present us with images from our daily existence culled from the pages of the New York Times. Everything laboriously burned, this rite of fire, exposes us to these images for a second time this time demanding more attention. It is this active act of looking, that the artist is interested in engaging us in.

Davide Cantoni has shown extensively in Europe and the US and is held in many private and public collections (including MoMA and Osram).

Books and DVDs related to artists in this show

Location   Gallery Daneyal Mahmood Gallery Address 511 W 25th St, 3rd Fl New York (Chelsea) NY, 10001 United States Phone 212-353-1253 Hours Tue-Sat 10-6 Nearby: All 26 galleries at 511 W 25th St

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