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116.5 x 78.5 cm
oils and acrylics on composite surface
2003 - 2008
"Despair" is the first in a series of paintings that intends to marry political decisions to their humanitarian consequences. I'm well aware that this is an entirely fashionable effort (even Botero - he's a great artist - has an Abu Ghraib series), but I started it in 2003, when the war in Iraq was still popular with many. Also, not addressing a subject because it's fashionable is also a form of fashionable behavior.
This series was inspired by the war in Iraq, as well as the Palestinian-Israelian conflict, which should not be taken as an attempt, on my part, to become politically involved, because the above-mentioned conflicts dominated public debate in 2003 and can motivate an anti-war series as well as any other.
However gruesome television images of armed conflicts may often be, people today have developed the ability to reduce such images to a visual statistic and it's up to artists to create images that stick to the retina. In this series of paintings I will attempt to contribute to the reduction of media-numbness, not in order to shock or upset, but to promote empathy.
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