Breakfast on the grass (2) (AFTER EDOUARD MANET) Photograph - Limited Edition of 5

The photographs in the Appropriated Images series draw on two artistic traditions. Firstly with the iconic canvas of Impressionism, Eduard Manet's 'Breakfast on the Grass', relating to the culture of leisure, discovered in the 19th century and now set in a 21st century context. The washed-out colour of digital photography provocatively rejects Manet's programmatic impressionist 'pure' colour. In doing so, it becomes literally/materialistically, yet metaphorically, an image of passing time and flawed memory that sublimely but nevertheless inaccurately evokes a seemingly well-known original whose 19th-century semantics are also obliterated. My "Breakfast..." is thus part of the discourse of photography as an index, an imprint, an archive, and is part of the current of photography's dialogue with art and Roland Barthes's concept. The second source is Romanticism and its strategy of theatricalising the image. In a clearing surrounded by a frame of dark forest, as in Caspar David Friedrich's canvases, four people sitting on the grass are the punctum of the image. The group is in the depths of the painting, separated from the viewer by water like a proscenium in a theatre. The light coming from outside the frame disturbs the seemingly idyllic scene, creating a dark, disturbing aura straight out of film noire and disaster cinema: someone/something is watching these people? These evocations and transformations are not coincidental: in my remembering gaze, I explore the problem of the polymorphousness of Romanticism in the current situation of its opacity of meaning as an unfinished project of the Other Modernity. Photograph reproduced on the cover of 'Artmajeur Magazine' 2023 No. 26, featured article in this issue: Olimpia Gaia Martinelli, Portrait d'Artiste:Marta Lesniakowska, p. 38-40.