tHE sADDEST pAiNTiNGS
  iN tHE wORLD


 
 
   
  • # ..... The saddest fact of each and every modern military conflicts is that the worst casualties of such are children, and to make things even worse, these casualties usually take places after the military conflicts are over. It is them, the children living in the areas of all these recent military conflicts, who have gotten exposed to so called left overs of unexploded ammunition scattered on the ground, who due to their natural childish curiosity bring them to the proximity and or create temptations to pick those strange shiny objects off the ground. Unfortunately those very same actions trigger mechanism in these ammunition which leads to tremendous physical traumas, the worst, death.

    This is the reason I called this series of paintings, "The Saddest Paintings in the World," for with these paintings I depict the very same items, left over ammunition, i.e., unexploded land mines and or cluster bomblets, and their physicality, size, in relation to hands holding them. What makes the subject of matter even more difficult is the hideousness of the paradox that such small items as land mines and, especially, cluster bomblets can cause such traumatic consequences upon a physical body.

    There is another aspect of this work that is important to be mentioned. This project was done by making use of, at the time, my three-year-old daughter's paintings she did at her school. She painted the abstract, colorful and gestured paintings, background layer, while I painted the front layer, images of hands holding land mines and or cluster bomblets, and by that fact actually altered, destroyed, her paintings. These paintings are done by the faculties, hands of my child and of myself, representing the very same faculties of unfortunate victims which are the ones to be harmed by the hideous nature of these types of ammunition. Using this signifier / signified adds an additional layer of the emotional impact and together with the final work-paintings would reflect on a more personal level realization of paradoxical and as well horrendous acts that cluster bomblets and land mines are causing upon innocent population, especially children.


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    © Goran Maric 2006