•After Cana, © k37 studio, Bethanien Art Center-Berlin (Enter Foundation Collection)
Jorge Da Cruz
After Cana (The Great Arrival / The World Creation), 2018
Charcoal on paper, 240 × 300 cm
Assembled from sixteen sheets
Collection: Enter Foundation
Text by Berna Valada, 2021
In After Cana, Jorge da Cruz reworks Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana not as a faithful reproduction, but as a charcoal reinterpretation that transforms the original scene from celebration into quiet unease.
Veronese’s 1563 painting is full of Renaissance grandeur: sweeping architecture, fine tableware, silk-draped guests, and the miracle that turns water into wine. da Cruz keeps the bones of the composition — the long banquet table, the crowded gathering, the theatrical arrangement — but removes the sense of certainty. Here, the miracle runs in reverse.
Water rises instead of receding. It enters from the lower left, crossing the patterned floor and reaching the musicians’ boots. A few guests begin to notice. Most continue to lift their glasses, holding on to the illusion of festivity.
The surface of the work also carries part of this tension. The drawing is assembled from sixteen sheets of paper, and the visible seams create a faint grid that quietly fractures the image. These joins suggest how easily things — an image, a ritual, a social order — can begin to come apart.
Near the top of the composition, a large area of untouched paper opens into sky. Three small birds circle above the rooftops. That pale blankness feels almost louder than the rest of the drawing, like a breath held before the water rises further.
What After Cana offers is not only a reflection on a historical painting, but a meditation on abundance and its fragility. The table still appears full, but the ground beneath it is changing. The rising water may suggest environmental crisis, but the work reaches beyond that. It asks how we keep celebrating while things quietly fall apart, how easily we toast to plenty while the floor begins to flood.
After Cana lingers in the space between ritual and rupture, asking how long we can continue pretending that everything is fine.
This work was acquired by the Enter Foundation in 2019.
BV
The Wedding Feast at Cana
Paolo Veronese, 1563
Oil on canvas, 677 × 994 cm
Louvre Museum, Paris
The Wedding Feast at Cana is a monumental painting by Paolo Veronese, completed in 1563. Measuring almost seven by ten meters, it was originally commissioned for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Today, it is housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, where it remains one of the most expansive and complex works of the Italian Renaissance.
The painting represents the biblical episode of the wedding at Cana, described in the Gospel of John, where Christ performs his first miracle by turning water into wine. Veronese places the scene inside a vast architectural space, with classical columns, open terraces, and a long banquet table filled with guests, servants, musicians, animals, and small narrative details.
Although the subject is sacred, the atmosphere belongs strongly to Venetian life. The figures wear clothing from Veronese’s own time: rich fabrics, elaborate patterns, jewels, and ceremonial garments. The biblical event is transformed into a grand Renaissance banquet, where spiritual meaning and worldly abundance exist in the same image.
The scale of the work is overwhelming, but its power also lies in the details. Every gesture, gaze, object, and figure contributes to the rhythm of the composition. Deep reds, blues, greens, golds, and luminous whites create a surface full of movement, texture, and light.
More than a simple illustration of a miracle, The Wedding Feast at Cana is an orchestration of spectacle, architecture, ritual, and social life. It shows Veronese’s extraordinary ability to organize a crowded scene without losing clarity, turning a biblical story into an image of abundance, theatre, and controlled excess.
For After Cana, this painting becomes the starting point: a scene of celebration later transformed into uncertainty, flooding, and quiet collapse.
The Wedding Feast at Cana-Paolo Veronese, 1563