↳ The Artwork

Teconoco and Ollin Editions are proud to announce the release of Da Vinci Staircase, our first collaboration with the Los Angeles-based artist, Sayre Gomez, on June 23rd, 2024. This limited edition print also marks the first collaboration between our new publishing companies.

The new print edition Da Vinci Staircase, 2024 is based on the painting of the same name from 2022, which was part of the artist’s solo exhibition Renaissance Collection at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy. The title of this exhibition referenced an ongoing series of real estate developments in Downtown Los Angeles, with vaguely patriarchal names such as the ‘Medici’, ‘Orsini’, ‘Visconti’, ‘Piero’, ‘Da Vinci’, ‘Lorenzo’, and most recently ‘Ferrante’. Names that all seem to suggest a bourgeois ruling class of Florence and Tuscany during the Renaissance; a far stretch from the redevelopment project of Downtown Los Angeles.

The absurdly faux European artifice of these housing developments had caught the artist’s attention while living in one during his graduate studies, and in particular the detail of the interior space’s corners being rounded. This stood out, ‘as something subtle yet important. A space where nothing has the potential of being harmful, a total fantasy inside and out.’ In Gomez’s words: ‘The first time I referenced the developments in my work was in 2016, while the ‘Da Vinci’ was still in production (for the second time). In 2013 an arson created a million square foot fire at the building site. The only thing left standing was the looming steel staircases protruding from the massive piles of wreckage alongside the 110 freeway. I made a sculpture of a miniature staircase coupled with a hidden fog machine to commemorate what had happened.’

Gomez’s hyper-realistic work challenges the viewer’s ability to differentiate between authenticity and simulation in a digital, image-saturated and screen-based world. His dreamy, post-apocalyptic sunset-scapes evoke conflicting feelings of both horror and blissful preoccupation; apt reactions for a city like Los Angeles, which is so full of contradictions. The brutal, jarring symmetry of the staircase standing in contrast to the soft evening sky was translated deftly by master serigraph printer Daniel Wlazlak for this new print edition. Building the luminous sky up through layers of airbrushed films, and completing the foreground wreckage through a digitally generated dot pattern, this new print constructs the next iteration of a structure in the state of rising and falling. As a totemic signifier, what does the burnt staircase stand in for? Ascent, escalation, escape. It bears a crude resemblance to Leonardo Da Vinci’s engineering drawings, his lofty thoughts that ran the gamut from war machines (tanks), to aerial corkscrews (helicopters), to bridges and scaling ladders for sieges. Designs and plans that have been largely sidelined by his benignly smiling Mona Lisa, or Christ enjoying a final meal with his apostles.

For Gomez, the city is a barometer of changing cultural and economic conditions, a deeply layered structure that is ripe for semiotic analysis, whereby it is not so much the structures themselves that are of interest but what they signify and are capable of evoking. From a sculpture, to a painting, to a print, over an 11 year timespan. We currently have another batch of exposed steel staircases straddling the opposite side of the freeway from the now inhabited ‘Da Vinci’ development. Situated on one of the busiest and most congested arteries of the city’s freeway system, we will soon again be delivered a bland approximation of Renaissance class, in an entirely unfitting location; Los Angeles playing itself. Perhaps over time, the allure of European balcony living will give way to the reality of smog-filled walls and patio windows, the incessant noise of commuting vehicles, views of the anonymous glass-walled skyscrapers of banking and commerce, and the misery of the City of Angels’ ever-expanding homeless encampments. Still, the sunsets will never disappoint.