Andrea Canepa

The work of Andrea Canepa (Lima, 1980) lies in a space of dialogue between art, sociology, history, and anthropology. From this territory, Canepa explores how systems of visual, spatial, and symbolic organization mold the ways of seeing and understanding the world. Through a multidisciplinary practice, she approaches these systems as case studies which, remote as they may seem in space or time, invite to reflect on the way we live in today’s world.

Andrea Canepa’s proposal for the second intervention on the tarpaulin temporarily covering the Palacio de Cristal while it undergoes restoration is centered on the textile bundles of the pre-Columbian culture of Paracas and the ancestral ritual of enwrapping the dead. The act of covering up, together with the many meanings contained in these bundles, has fascinated Canepa since childhood. Those bodies carefully wrapped in numerous layers of exquisitely woven cloths, where each pattern is laden with symbolism, left a deep imprint on her imagination. The artist moreover stresses the importance of the process, with time, gesture, and the ritual of covering presented as a fundamental episode that gives it more weight than its apparently provisional character. The tarpaulin now covering the Palacio thus ceases to be a merely temporary surface to become an element full of sense, a veil that transforms waiting into a time of significance.

The tarpaulin shows images of bound and superimposed cloths. These are photographic reproductions enlarged on the basis of previously executed oil paintings. The capture of an instant through photography is thus combined with the reiterated gesture of painting, with its attentive observation and translation of what is perceived. Painting reality requires contemplating matter without questioning it, and this relaxed and almost meditative rhythm opens up a link to ritual. With this superimposition of temporalities and material media, Bundle generates a subtle sense of alienation. Beyond the immediate gaze, it reminds that reality is denser and more multifarious than the simple appearance people prefer to take refuge in.

Canepa transfers these ideas to the context of the Palacio de Cristal, a 19th-century building representing a modernity for which transparency was a supreme value. Designed to be seen and to display, the building is now undergoing a phase of transformation that demands it be covered up and hidden from view. By wrapping it symbolically in layers of cloth, the artist undermines this logic of absolute visibility and invites us to retrieve what modernity banished: the mysterious, the sacred, the sensuality of material, and the right to opacity.

Canepa’s intervention also links the iron and glass architecture of the Palacio de Cristal with another of the great technical advances of its time: the optical artifacts precursory to the cinema. The building turns into a contemporary praxinoscope which transforms its glass panels into sequences covering and discovering textiles, generating a narrative cycle that is completed only by the movement of the visitor. In this back-and-forth motion between veiling and revealing, time ceases to be linear to become an experience: it stretches and folds over on itself, oscillating between presence and absence, between what is shown and what is held back.