AFTERMATH

AFTERMATH, 2017
1800 x 1200 mm
Oil on digital collage on board

“Aftermath” draws a parallel between representations of war and power, ranging from classical Greek constructs of ‘heroic masculinity’ to the current powerful and violent political machine of ISIS and its skilful use of propaganda. “Aftermath” is counter-pointing beauty and technology through iconic art historical representations such as the “Laocoön and his sons” (50 BC) sculpture in the Vatican Museum.

The “Laocoön and his sons” sculpture (in general) is considered a symbol of the ‘height of human achievement’ and ‘heroic masculinity’, wherein the Greek priest Laocoön was murdered after trying to expose the fraud of the Trojan horse by attacking it with a lance. AD-Reflex places the sculpture in a distinctly 2Oth and 21st century ‘virtual world’, where the central figures are not necessarily under attack from mythological sea serpents (as in the 50 BC original sculpture), but by the likes of Second World War planes and other (newer) forms of destruction, that resonates with recent ISIS brutality against cultural artefacts as a carefully considered ideology of cultural and religious purity.

The work moves in the grey area between abstraction and representation and uses the strengths of both – the ability of representational imagery to communicate specific ideas via the object’s inherent symbolism and the mood and feeling that abstract imagery creates in a very powerful way. The landscape becomes an atmosphere, a darkness, barely sketched in. Through the deconstructive approach of AD-Reflex, violence infiltrates the process wherein the artists remind the viewer that war tears and rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.