Arms


War is both a concrete and an ambiguous event, because it claims to define the historical moment, when in fact, in terms of culture, it tends to destroy even our memory: unfortunately, time after time, at the end of the conflict what remains is a pile of debris where there once were monuments, works of art, evidence of life.

In contemporary iconography war and arms make us aware that it is not the individual who determines the destiny of humanity, but instead a politic-economic power that controls all events, especially those marked by mass violence. The perception of our own powerlessness in the face of this system creates an esthetic that, from expressionism to today, tends to define itself as ethics; it therefore invades in a critical way a reality in which the subject is often lost.

In a similar context, today’s artists perceive the absurdity of a logic which employs overwhelming power and death, and respond by transforming weapons into toys or into purely aesthetic objects. Or, alternatively, contemporary artists denounce dramatic situations through images that are unexpected, in a formal sense…




Simona Vendrame
Translation by Jacqueline Smith