BILDER ÜBER DIE KULTUR / DEN ALTEN BEKANNTEN:
M 01, M 02, M 03, M 04, 2022
watercolour, charcoal, chalk, sshoe-pronts on paper
The "M"-series forms part of my ongoing "Pictures About Culture / To The Old Acquaintancies"-projects. When I began to work on it in winter 2022, Putin's army had not yet invaded Ukraine, and Italy's government was still led by Mario Draghi.
The four mixed-media drawings are based on a photography I came across accidentally in a newspaper. Interested in the photo's chiaroscuro, I took a picture. Only later I detected the image's carefully prepared staging: on a sunny day, a stubby man, naked torso, funny hat, is sitting on a sledge in the snow, gazing towards the horizon. The man on that photo from the 1930s is Benito Mussolini. He was the first dictator to eagerly cultivate a self-image of a virile, fit, and sexy sporting ace. Vladimir Putin uses his bare torso in similar poses, as the embodiment of his faschistic concept of masculinity.
Working on the "M"-series, I tried to seize this pictorial staging, and to break it up. In the series, it should be palpable that the drawings refer to one specific photography. However, the figure is either upside down, cropped, or mirrored and the parts suggesting a man's limbs are often severed by shoe prints appearing in the layers of watercolour. In my rendering of the source material, the sublayers keep eating up or etching away the figure. They seem to be forming organs and body parts of their own right. The figure-ground relation remains volatile, while the despot's Gestalt is dissolving within the moving, amorphous forms of the watercolour underneath.
