AIMEE CARDOSO

In undergrad, I had the rare opportunity to study painting in Orvieto, Italy, a city with deep connections to its historical past and Italy’s great lineage of artists, poets, and saints, dating from Etruscan through Modern times. This series draws inspiration from my ongoing studies of Renaissance paintings dating from the 14th–15th centuries.

In small-scale and square format oil paintings, I closely examine vestments, objects, and gestures found in religious paintings. After extracting these elements from historical works of art, they are then re-represented, slightly altered and magnified, enhancing their visual force but also drawing attention to the subtleties of their construction.

Though the series takes traditional painterly subjects, such as folded drapery and figurative gesture, as a focus, collectively, these works reveal a surprisingly nuanced and affecting study of both figure and still life. The paired down approach and bold treatment of color and shadow draws attention to the surprising drama of these abstracted details. With this treatment, they more deeply resonate, as whole sources of new meaning, and offer the viewer a closer look at the methods of religious gesture and image making.