Tourist 2 (Martina) Painting

„The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.“ (Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle) For the first time, I decided to make my painting a construct from the very outset. Although delivered as an imitation of a photograph, the scene in question is not documentary (even if it was staged), but rather a complex scene created through digital manipulation and then transferred into the medium of painting. It is at the same time the falsification of reality, as well as its product. I used a painting by Adrien Ghenie (exhibited at the Venice Biennale) to serve as the backdrop, being a recognizable commonplace within the culture world. At the same time, it was not my goal to refer to the painting nor its author, but rather to point out the status of the painting as a marketing product, a spectacle reduced to a recognizable poster. And it is the main task of a spectacle to present to us, using various forms of mediation, the world we are no longer able to experience directly.