In the painting, the coldness and transitory character of the newspaper item becomes something perpetual, decorous, and elegant.īy making paintings of the richest and most powerful capitalists -people whose money is as much behind and involved with the artwork as it is in other forms of commercial exploitation- Cano is also placing the normally hidden dealings of the art world at center stage.
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This framing adds intensity to the pictorial image, acting like a series of brackets or quotation marks, hemming in the portrait head, to make the viewer see these already public portraits under a new, critical and analytical light. The textual area in Cano’s newspaper paintings acts as a frame for the image.
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The portrayed financiers represent the idols of a society that sees capital and economic growth as sacred values.Ĭano’s portraits of super-capitalists in his Wall Street One Hundred series may be thought of as an archive rather than a few discrete portraits that happen to bear a similar formal layout. As a result, this series is reminiscent of both necropolis and wax works, evoking the notion of sacred and contemporary icons. The Wall Street One Hundred series reveals elements of fetish and funereal portraiture that are especially apparent in a large spatial installation. Therefore, Cano’s artwork includes are contemporaneous portraits of people whose (economic) legacies have become relevant worldwide, implying both historical and physical references: the typical portraits of great businessmen of the world like chairmen and directors of transnational companies, banks, public treasuries, ministers and other personalities of economic power who appear in every new item in the Wall Street Journal, along with a small extract from the text of the item. Research has found that only about 1-2% of Fayum’s people could afford to have their portrait painted, and that sitters typically belonged to the affluent upper social strata of government officials, religious dignitaries, military officers and other well-connected families. This connection between mummies, death masks, and portrait painting later inspired the French theoretician André Bain to associate the origins of painting and sculpture with what he called a “mummy complex.” He described it as an expression of the psychological need in man to artificially preserve his bodily appearance. These portraits, painted on wooden panels and attached to mummies, were part of the funerary rites of Roman Egypt. The Fayum mummy portraits made in Egypt in the 1 st to the 3 rd centuries AD, are early and well-known examples of encaustic paintings. Encaustic enables José María Cano to play with binary concepts such as opacity and transparency, the tactile and the optical, and then use these expressive possibilities to exploit their symbolic potential.Įncaustic painting’s genealogy is linked to archaic practices and forms, as well as a belief in the magical power of the image and its creation process. For the artist, there is a close connection between the traditional encaustic procedure and the latest avant-garde technique in terms of themes. Wax’s organic origin and its semi-transparent and tactile characteristics contrast with the mechanical and industrial nature of the media used in newspapers. Based on newspaper clippings taken directly from the Wall Street Journal, José María Cano painstakingly reproduced the small portraits, and surrounding the column text in each clipping in large scale using encaustic painting.
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