The Serving Library: On (-)Pentimenti

In tandem with the launch of his monograph No Joke, Sanya Kantarovsky will speak around and about The Librarian (2012), a small oil painting in The Serving Library’s archive of artifacts. The talk will explore the painterly phenomenon of pentimenti – an Italian word used to refer to visible instances of previous decisions underneath the surface of a finished painting. The word’s original meaning, “to repent,” situates this residue of making with the artist’s internal moral compass: a “wrong” precipitates a repentance to a “right.” Naturally, repentance remains an eternally contemporary concern.

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