Description

The work recalls the Vanitas or still lifes with moralizing purposes in vogue in 1600, they alluded above all, through the symbolic representation of inanimate objects (flowers, fruit, vegetables, skulls), to the precariousness of human life. In the 1600s wars and pestilences anguished the European people, today they are increasingly powerful and sophisticated nuclear weapons, which could annihilate all humanity at any moment. In the representation there are a vase of flowers and an ocarina, but the body nature and the colors are reduced to the minimum terms or to a monotonous dark shadow: the stylistic language is that of the atomic bomb. Since the etched shadows have a similarity with those made with the photographic technique, I thought about using this last one to print shadows as if they were made with a nuclear explosion; in other words as if I used the atomic bomb to create artistic prints. The most congenial technique to create this type of prints is certainly that of the "gumoil", the printing process devised by Karl Koenig in 1990, it is a variant of the process of contact printing of gum bichromate, in particular, instead of using a negative is used a positive, that must have the same dimension of the final image, the prints also have the characteristic of being at high-contrast and therefore without intermediate grays, another very interesting aspect, as dye they use the traditional oil colors, same that the greatest part of the painters have been using for centuries.