Da Michelangelo 1978

Editor: So this is Tano Festa’s "Da Michelangelo" from 1978. It's acrylic on canvas, with what looks like some collage elements too. There’s something striking about the two-tone rendering; a dark ground and an overlayed green that gives it a striking contemporary, even Pop-art, feel, even if it is directly referencing Renaissance art. How do you approach this piece? Curator: Immediately I think about Festa’s choice of materials, and what it says about his practice. Why acrylic paint? What did it mean to repurpose, essentially mass produce, Michelangelo’s image with this industrial medium? And placed on what appears to be graph paper? Consider the means of production. Was this “high art” in the traditional sense? Editor: So you're saying that by using acrylic and collage, Festa is blurring the lines between traditional fine art and something more…accessible? Curator: Precisely! The choice of these very materials disrupts the aura that traditionally surrounds classical art. He is recontextualizing this iconic image within a framework of modern production. Consider also how the grid, like graph paper, hints at mechanical reproduction, further challenging the romantic notion of the artist’s hand. Editor: I hadn't thought of it that way, but that grid makes sense as part of that intention. I initially saw it as simply a compositional element. Curator: And isn’t the geometric component echoed in that choice of checkerboard tonality between dark and light in the figure and the ground, flattening out our spatial relationships to it, as if the Renaissance figure were being presented, in this new medium, in only its most salient elements? How does that all play out in terms of consumerism? Editor: That’s a completely different lens for viewing it – I hadn't connected that geometric repetition to mass production and distribution. I see how this forces us to examine how art is created, distributed, and valued. Thanks, that’s really opened my eyes to a lot more to explore!