She who is not
“What does one paint? One paints the death of painting and of the author. Ela que não está (She that is not (there)) is a series of paintings made after a Giotto fresco from the Bardi chapel, in Florence, a work Daniel and I know only through reproductions: a religious scene, a dead saint surrounded by priests who mourn his death. What calls our attention is a flaw: perhaps some peeling of the fresco, perhaps some material that has been deposited onto it – it doesn’t matter.The fault is a figure, and Daniel’s gesture is to paint it; appropriating a non-painting by Giotto, rendering it with non-paints (iron filings, “cockroach wing” varnish). Unable to adopt a new object of love, the painter recalls and returns to the first painter of the modern history of painting. In a para-appropriation, he ignores the work of the one who announces the Renaissance (here it is She that is not) , to suggest other figures: an architectural form, the house and shroud of Giotto.”
(excerpt from text “Daniel Senise” by Adriano Pedrosa, published in catalogue of the artist’s exhibition at Thomas Cohn Arte Contemporânea, São Paulo, 1994)
