War Games, 2003
A series of two-part paintings consisting of photographs on canvas in the lower part and its painterly repetitions in the upper part. Images of war are scenes with soldiers, combat equipment, a helicopter, a fighter plane, performances taken from reports broadcast on TV and the Internet, direct broadcasts serving images of war “live”.
War games with duplicating images show the medialization of war as a “spectacle of impressions” which was supposed to provoke Baudrillard to deny it. The artist refers to exploiting the virtualization of war, to the ways of presenting and visualizing “war as a video game”. In his paintings, we are dealing with a vision in which the perspective of a player using a joystick coincides with the shots of night vision devices on soldiers’ helmets, a gaze that dominates the contemporary view of war.
