Benedita Kendall

The painting Ensaio sobre a sorte, by Benedita Kendall, begins with a painting by the Renaissance painter Giorgione da Castelfranco, La Tempesta, which is considered, by some art historians, as the first representation of a landscape in Western art. The painting, which has no devotional, allegorical, or historical content, is offered to view without a clear intention: one of the possible interpretations of the motif of the figuration – a thundering black sky over a city in the background and, on the foreground, two figures, unrelated, inhabiting a bucolic landscape – refers to the research on dualities such as city-countryside or man-woman. The painting by Benedita Kendall is developed over two canvases, placed side by side. One of them is filled with several figure contours that reproduce different circumstances, gestures or everyday life situations, overlapping. The other portion of the painting is in opposition to the restraining sensation of the first. Two figures, a woman and a man, are isolated and pulled to the foreground, represented in a larger dimension. The texture of the background unites the two canvases with a volatile paint wash, similarly to the ambiguity that is conveyed to us by the painting of the Venetian painter. The artist assumes the appropriation/citation of La Tempesta by inserting an element from the composition (a woman feeding a child), but not only does she recover the possible dialectics broached by Giorgione, she also makes reference to symbolisms from other contexts, such as the wheel of fortune (an element of medieval painting). The coexistence of several times, meanings and images in a same discursive plane constitutes itself as one of the current challenges in contemporary art, and materializes in this Ensaio sobre a sorte.