"Natureza Morta" Painting

"Art is not something you hang in the dinning room." This has always been my definition of art. Art is not supposed to be "easily digested" - We are not supposed to have lunch while observing a massacre; nor have dinner whilst appreciating a redemption; nor fall in love during breakfast. Art is supposed to take our breath away, capture our attention. My art has a hold on dreams, my dreams, society's consumerist dreams, and our consumed dreams. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Said Philip K. Dick. Between the years 2011 - 2013 I was haunted by the amazing and unlikely nature of reality. I responded to the disturbing reality by using it to my advantage and creating artworks. Appropriation is the central concept in my artwork. I appropriated myself of publicity outdoor images and recreated them into huge oil paintings, such as a Calvin Klein advertisement that took more than a year to be completed. In the "Celeb" series I appropriated myself of many famous images of celebrities such as: Heath Ledger, Angelina Jolie, Scarlet Johansson, amongst others, and created several different oil paintings. Another example is the series entitled: "The Book of Faces of Facebook" I collected many profile pictures of friends and recreated them using charcoal. My art does not consist of making an exact copy of reality; after choosing an image I open it on Photoshop and divide every single different hue into small squares until I find the exact shades of color for each and every one of them. The irony in my work is the fact that I use an incredibly old technique (oil painting) to reproduce an accurate copy of an image created to sell pairs of jeans - something that is supposed to be a mass production, that takes years to be completed. This same ironic procedure is used in the creation of portraits in the "Celebs" series. Both in "Celebs" and in "The book of faces of Facebook" there is a third element, vital for the post-capitalist accumulation frenzy. Celebrities' countless parades and ordinary faces can be seen as a play with both: our common desire - in relation to the recognizable images, and with their desire in relation to us (the celebrities and the Facebook friends); the culture market and the friendship market. Along with this critic appropriation in my art, collages became a new focus for research.