Exploring the world opened up by a work of art
This week’s showcase:
Oscar Camilo de las Flores
“El Gran General” Conte crayon on paper, 79″ x 50.5″
The “Big Macs” are his balls. . . . but wait there’s more, much more. . . . OMG, TMI. Made you look.
Too much information can be disturbing, deadly in its extreme. (Just think ingesting disinfectant.) In this time of “Isolation” we are being bombarded with WAY too much information. We are like sitting ducks in front of a screen, fixated on every morsel of information. And like moths to a flame, we can’t avert our eyes or ears from the oncoming disaster.
So it is with this drawing. Oscar, like Dante, has been through hell, plumbing the depths of human depravity, laying bare for us a prescient tome of all things vile. This portrait of war-mongering generals has everything from forbidden swastikas, icons of commercial greed, machismo, arrogance and ignorance, to a skewered Christ figure (representing us, the General’s subjects) inside a keg upon which he sits and relieves his bowels. Wow.
Every square inch is chocked full of information to keep us mesmerized for days. And Oscar’s rendering technique is equally engrossing in acuity and 3D reality. (I’ve never seen a conte crayon drawing of this scale, this detailed, this clean.)
. . . All to bring home the point of what is real. Because somehow it captures the vile, the destructive in all of us. Like it or not, it resonates. But unlike raw “shock art” which is soullessly designed to merely ascertain if you have a pulse, this piece brings a certain pleasure and release from having seen and faced the worst. And dare I say it, there is beauty in something so disturbing and none the less truthful.
The subtitle of this series is “Exploring the World Opened Up by a Work of Art”. Fortunately for us, opening the world of art is not limited to pretty colors, California light, and the right number of cows out to pasture. It includes the oh so dark, yet oh so beautiful world of Oscar Camilo de las Flores.