ECCE HOMO

150x100 "Painting-Sculpture" in bas-relief on wooden panel built by hand by the author. Materials used: metallic paints, oil and acrylic paints, epoxy resin, extruded polystyrene, polyurethane foam, stucco and glues. 2020.

A work conceived a long time ago, during the period of "Cold War" between America and Russia, and realized perhaps out of time, during the Lockdown, in a period where the fear of nuclear power has certainly taken a back seat, momentarily pushed away and replaced by pandemic fear. Complex realization: An invention, that of Einstein, certainly made in good faith, for the good of humanity, but used badly by man who used it in the past, see Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and threatens to use it also in the future for mass destruction. In the work we see a hanged Einstein mocking, in what has become his most famous symbol, a blind and corrupt humanity, represented by snakes fleeing from the roots of trees bearing the colors of the two world powers. Trees that have been able to produce only money, still present on the branches, waste paper that burns, as represented by the bonfire in the center on a desert land now arid. In the background our ruin, the nuclear bomb. On a branch of the American tree hangs a symbolic clock, that of Hiroshima, stopped at the time of the explosion of the bomb on that distant August 6, 1945, to remind us that human stupidity never retires, that we are the only ones in the animal kingdom to repeat the same mistakes. Perched above these trees are four vultures, birds of prey that metaphorically await our corpses. However, at the top on the right, a reddish planet in an almost metallic grey sky represents a feeble hope of life for an uncertain future.