Wake up
Apart from the reporting aspect and the symbolic one of purity, which today is thrown away and forgotten amongst ruins, this series of paintings is titled 'Reality Show' because my main intention is a reflexion focused on the use of mass media, on the sometimes fading border between reality and fiction and also on how aesthetics today strongly influences ethics.
Comments 83
It is ironic, as you say, that such a powerful image, with its potential to shock large numbers of people out of their complacency and complicit acceptance of wars supposedly carried out in their name has been censored. Only two works of art have ever made me cry and for very different reasons, the first time I saw Michaelangelo's dying slave I was moved by the beauty, when I think about your image of the child's severed head I weep for the horror and futility.
I think your Reality series is the most shocking thing I have ever seen and that is obviously the point you were trying to get across. We have through the media become almost completely de-sensitised to war especially when it is air-brushed to the extent that it is in recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think your work is a real wake up call on a par with the famous photographic image of the naked screaming Vietnamese child which so shocked the previous generation.
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