“An associate of André Breton in the periodical Minotaure, Albert Skira (1904-1972), a French publisher, revolutionised the printing of art books by introducing an innovation at the moment each title was sent to print: the illustrations were sent to the machine one by one, thus ensuring excellence of the colour scales. Next, they were separately affixed on the pages, above the respective captions. Skira (2009-2010), a series of works by Daniel Senise, uses pages from those books, most of which were published in the first half of the 20th century, in order to construct the surface of architectural façades reminiscent of ‘brise-soleils’. Another French invention, these slanting windows, which Le Corbusier (1887-1965) disseminated worldwide, are an important feature of the urban landscape of the Modernist Rio de Janeiro of Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Affonso Eduardo Reidy.
The Carioca* artist uses those Skira pages after having removed the original prints, which leave behind a memory of the body that was once affixed there. […]
The absent body seen on the pages of Skira’s books has always been the dynamo of Senise’s poetics towards a broadened painting. The captions on the paper create a kind of lever for memory, which tries to recover from its files the images which were once placed above each caption. It is precisely here that the work touches upon another essential point of the oeuvre of the Brazilian artist: his relationship with Art History. Skira creates the Modernist architectural window from the ‘window’ left behind by the work of art on the page, in turn referencing a third one, the Renaissance window, the matrix of all of Western painting.”
(excerpt from text by Daniela Name to Daniel Senise’s exhibition at Gallery 32, 2010)
