Annihilation
An acquaintance of mine, a speech censor, once told me that he was proud of his profession, with the logic that censoring speech keeps our society stable, so that people feel happy and therefore can work for the happiness of society. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend who grew up in Japan and who told me that the concept of "self" does not exist in Japan. When I was in university, when I asked myself why we exist, my classmates laughed at me because I thought too much, so much so that I spent many years seeing myself as "strange".
My painting focuses on the description of small characters, destroyed by society, without faces, that I have decomposed and reconstructed. These unconscious human beings immersed in an ocean of nothingness but who only live brief happy and cheerful moments. You can see, for example, the Roman soldier who puts the crown of thorns on Christ, the citizen who denounces his Jewish neighbour to the Nazis, the people who reveled in the joy of killing during the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the student who denounces his teacher to the Revolutionary Committee during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the Japanese soldier who committed suicide on Iwo Jima during World War II.
In this exhibition I want to represent those people who, submerged in history, annihilated by society, neglect reflection in order to conform to society. They become accomplices of evil. Max Weber deals with the notion of charisma and for me people, out of laziness, no longer think, and let themselves be blinded by charismatic leaders. It was the social division of labour driven by the enslavement of society that led to the greatest atrocities of the 20th century.
In the light of Heinrich Bonhoeffer, for whom stupidity "is not intellectual but moral in nature; one is not born stupid, one becomes stupid", I think, like Socrates, that ignorance is the sin, indeed the evil of the century. It points to the lack of solidity of the foundations of our civilisation. Like the collapse of the Tower of Babel or the fall of Rome, we too can see the destruction of our civilisation, and it is necessary to make an introspection to avoid the erosion of this "original sin".