FASHION COLLECTION
Photomontage
The classic painting of Nicolas Poussin has been digitalized in the form of digital pictures. The previous image has in turn been manipulated using Photoshop. We can then find in the manipulated version of the painting an exaggerated representation of the war, but perhaps just for these reason it is closest to the reality of our world. The technique used is called photomontage; it means that the original image has been mixed with other images. The original subjects of the painting have been processed in contemporary subjects placed in a war scenario. The little ”putti” of the painting tradition became child soldiers equipped with gas masks and arms. Exaggerations that unfortunately remind us of the real children soldiers that are operative in different areas of the world. The bucolic scenery leaves room for an atmosphere of death and despair. Inspiration was the relationship between traditional art and new possibilities offered from the new technologies able to create a interaction with the opera, change it and operate on its meaning. In the last years the diffidence about the digital art is disappearing and the work of new visionary artists is getting more and more attention by the public. In the same way the author uses the modern technologies, mixed with the traditional painting, to counter the superficiality with which all too often we look at the images of disgrace that the fighting causes.
Printing-process
The manipulated images have been converted in four images according to the quadricomy division for the printing. It was not realized with the common ink jet process, but instead with the old technique of screen-printing: The first step was to print the image on tracing paper in four colour channels (in black and white), these four prints were exposed through the photographic process on particular screen covered with nylon tissue and coded with a photoemulsion. Each frame has been sprinkled with the four colours to transfer the image onto fabric used for the collection.
Interpretation
The fabric used is the same of the frame for oil painting, so as to accentuate the pictorial value of the clothes. The tissue has been sowed with other frics and modern materials to show a connection between past and present in the endless history of the violence of the war. Almost as a metaphor for the equal and opposite forces that have always crossed the history of mankind, in the work of the author the composure of classical figures merges with brutality of the war, scenes of poverty are intertwined with elements that refer to the pomp and the wealth. The models wear literally the war on their skin as a testimony of impossibility to limit any conflict to a single geographical area or to a single historical period. The war is unfortunately totalizing and “as all the battles of” man, it implies a chain of events unidentifiable in a single historical period, which become part of the cultural heritage of man, in the same way every victim of human violence, although far thousands of kilometers touches us in first person and makes us passive spectators or authors. Only stimulating the sensitivity “of men is possible to fight this guilty emotional stasis and promote a renewed awareness that allows a real empathic understanding of reality“ that flows under our eyes.