After Cana, © k37 studio, Bethanien Art Center-Berlin (Enter Foundation Collection)
Jorge Da Cruz (b. 1974)
After Cana (“The Great Arrival / The World Creation”), 2018
Charcoal on paper, 240 × 300 cm (assembled from sixteen sheets)
Collection: Enter Foundation
After Cana
Text by Berna Valada, 2021
In After Cana, Jorge Da Cruz creates a reworking of Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana—not a faithful reproduction, but a reinterpretation, drawn in charcoal, that transforms the original scene from celebration to 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—but strips away the joy. Here, the miracle runs in reverse. Water rises instead of receding, creeping in from the lower left, flooding the patterned floor, brushing up against the musicians’ boots. A few guests begin to notice. Most lift their glasses, holding fast to the illusion of festivity.
Even the surface of the work plays a part in the tension. The drawing is made up of sixteen sheets tiled together, their seams forming a faint grid that fractures the image. These visible joins quietly suggest how easily things—an image, a ritual, a social order—might come undone. Near the top, a large section of untouched paper opens into sky. Three small birds circle there, above the rooftops. That pale blankness feels louder than the rest—like a breath held, just before the water reaches higher.
What Da Cruz offers isn’t just a reflection on a historical painting, but a meditation on abundance and its fragility. The table still looks full, but the ground beneath it is shifting. Though the rising water hints at environmental crisis, the work reaches further. It asks how we manage to keep celebrating while things quietly fall apart—how easily we toast to plenty, even as the floor begins to flood. After Cana lingers in that space between ritual and rupture, asking how long we can keep pretending 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 work by Paolo Veronese, completed in 1563. Measuring nearly seven by ten meters, the painting was originally commissioned for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. It now resides in the Louvre Museum, where it stands as one of the most expansive and complex compositions of the Italian Renaissance.
The scene illustrates the biblical account of the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11), where Christ performs his first miracle by turning water into wine. Veronese stages the event within a vast architectural setting—an open banquet hall framed by classical columns and rising structures. The table is crowded with figures: guests, servants, musicians, and animals, each rendered with careful attention to posture, gesture, and gaze.
Rich in visual detail, the work merges sacred narrative with the grandeur of Venetian life. The attire is contemporary to Veronese’s time—layered fabrics, intricate patterns, and finely rendered jewelry—imbuing the scene with a sense of lived opulence. The palette is luminous: deep reds, greens, blues, and golds cohere in a rhythm of light and surface that animates the entire composition.
More than an illustration, The Wedding Feast at Cana is an orchestration of movement and stillness, intimacy and spectacle. It exemplifies Veronese’s mastery of scale, atmosphere, and spatial complexity—qualities that continue to resonate far beyond its historical context.
The Wedding Feast at Cana
Paolo Veronese, 1563