Paintings
The last two decades of the artist’s work are mainly paintings, both painted paintings and large-format photographic images. His art is immersed in contemporary visuality, but it is primarily about the medialization of contemporary experience. Artist refers to the visuality of cinema, television, masterpieces of old art, the Internet, and anonymous photographs.
On a monumental canvas which is a paraphrase of Francisco Goya’s work of the same title, the artist modernized the theme of war and violence. In the right part of the picture he repeated the cropped representation of the firing squad, while in the left part he replaced the executed insurgents with a modern snapshot of street riots in Palestine. The distance between these two scenes, belonging to other epochs, is marked by the “empty”, middle part of the painting in which nothing is happening. This central part of the composition seems to be the most significant, reminiscent of diagnoses about the disappearance of a reality that is being supplanted by its media imaginations.
In the monumental canvas, the artist used repetition to exorcise media nightmares. In the elongated image, he multiplied the figure of a masked warrior. The sinister crowd of armed, faceless figures is a visualization of the “war of images” launched in the name of the “war on terror”. Wars with the image of an invisible enemy, a terrorist phantasm, the effect of which was to be “cloning terror”.
Contrary to Picasso, the artist did not paint the horrors of war, but showed the images and mechanisms of inciting war with a visual reference to the enemy’s media imaginations.
Artist incorporated the contemporary scene into the frame of an old, sixteenth-century painting. The figure from Carravagia, leaning over the water surface, was faithfully repeated, but instead of its mirror image, two seated figures were painted. One of them is a man with a white blindfold tied around his eyes, which triggers associations with victims of violence. Hovering over a sitting couple, Narcissus is a quotation not only from Caravaggio facing the myth of Narcissus, but also a quote from Caravaggio himself, the ways of receiving his art and perception drawing from visual memory, connecting the past with the present. In the tragic for the protagonist Ovid’s inability to recognize the border between reality and fiction, we finally recognize contemporary diagnoses concerning the mediation of the world in the media.
