Art Explained: Tempus

J. Antonio FARFAN

Tempus ( Aged Painting )

2016/ 2019

Acrylic, oil and gold leaf on linen - curtain is a second layer of linen

46 x 42 in. ( 116.8 x 106.7 cm) Advanced technology assists our search for answers in this age of rediscovery. The responses we are finding will take time to absorb as they overwhelm our senses and destabilize everything we were brought up to believe. Our entire society has changed dramatically on account of technology and continues to do so exponentially as artificial intelligence learns to simulate the specifics of human processing. Already, the once hidden parts of science, history and religion have cleared their murky existence and revealed thousands of distorted, erroneous and myth bound bits of information. Data has become a way to decipher truth and the new mindset of inquiry in every new generation is making the world visible from every conceivable angle. In his own work, Leonardo da Vinci, thought much on the comparison between man made constructs and natural phenomenon, a type of intellectual inquiry that defined the renaissance of the fifteenth century and equally as appropriate in our time, when the same methods of investigation highlight the concerns of our era. The curtain has been a recurring theme in my work for the past thirty years and has since been a both a decorative symbol and an indicator of revelation or concealment. It introduces a future truth or closes a past myth. The theatrical experience of discovery invites the viewer to ponder the tinier symbols being uncovered. In this painting titled, Tempus, a deep gray illuminates the larger part of the curtain, a dramatic lift exposes an underlying golden color revealing rain clouds in differing sizes atop a transferred image of the Last Supper of Christ. The grand reveal exposes new information about both Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan and his own intention of exposing a truth that lay hidden in the non superfluous iconography of his mural.