Artist Statement
Representation and visual consumption of violence inflicted by nature or by humankind is being increasingly normalized in today’s sensitivity.
New media have not only granted the technical possibility for the explicit depiction of violence but also for shortening the time and enlarging the space between the fact and its visual impact. Taking explicitness, immediacy and omnipresence as essential aesthetical values in contemporary society, one may wonder about the role of painting with respect to the current aesthetics of violence.
My recent work consists of a series of paintings and drawings depicting, indeed, the sequels of natural and “civilize” violence. The formal solutions introduced in this series are the consequence of a topic that my art work has been devoted to for more than a decade: the symbolic status of painting. In “the age of digital reproduction”, the act of painting has become, regardless of its content, a symbolic act in itself.
In my work, the easel, the brush, the pigments and foremost the whiteness of the canvas became the upper-class characters of a History of Art as the metaphor of the universal history and its drama of exclusion and overpowering.
In my new work a distinctive set of references from the sacred imagery of Art History is replaced by the ordinary images of violence and destruction from the new media. Yet, the most significant shift consisted of the displacement from a literary into a pictorial aspect of visual communication. Quotations from classic artworks have been substituted by what could be called “chromatic cites”. Van Gogh’s bright ochre or Cézanne’s olive green could be distinguished within the computer-manipulated digital images.
This “new fashion” it help me to articulate a critical statement on nowadays’ aesthetical naturalization of violence. From a distance, some of the pieces can be perceived as abstract paintings. As soon as the viewer approaches the horror unveils with ironic smoothness. Now the cynical gesture is to make a canvas recreating the rubble of a bus bomb to match the wall paint and furniture in a hall.
Some of these images represent monumental wreckages in a way that seems to perform as mausoleums of themselves, as reminders of a prominent past. One of the pieces that better expresses the striking monumentality and solemnity of the ruin is my early painting Coming from nowhere, 2005.
A man standing on the top of a stair is about to descend from a building that no longer exists. Standing still, petrified like a statue, as a part of the ruin, this man epitomises the psychological aspect of this series of cityscapes; their evocative silence and solitude. This silence that oppresses the mind of the viewer with its monumental appearance is the reverse of what occurs before the act of representation: the deadly racket whether a hurricane or a car bomb. Silence, thus, symbolizes its opposite: the crash or the clash prior to the first press-photo.
In this respect, the double translation of reality, from the fact to the digital media and from there to the canvas speaks about an inversion of the above-mentioned values of today’s informational language: explicitness, immediacy and omnipresence. This inversion occurs when a press-photo is digitally manipulated, dissolved into the pictorial language, froozen in the timelessness of the canvas and enclosed into the art gallery.
Once again, I am playing with the symbolic status of painting and it’s capacity to, at once, trivialise and monumentalise human drama.