BLOODY CHEQUE
Taking official portraits of kings and queens, who have been sentenced to death or murdered, as a starting point, Bloody Cheque is a reflection upon the representation of power through the centuries, as well as about power’s self-representation. By changing few chromatic details and the composition of the originals, which are portraits spanning from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, the artist has also introduced hybrid surrealist objects. Within the paintings, the viewer can find unseen, absurd and ambiguous situations, as a playful deconstruction of each iconographic source.
The series spans from Marie Antoinette and her harp-guigliottine, Ludwig II of Bavaria with an elephant/gun, or the tzar Nicholas II, whose military pins trigger fireworks; or empress Elizabeth of Austria, who accidentally pierces her dog with a sword, triggered from her own fan. All these explicitely ambiguous situations are imagined to boycott, as well as to ideally complete, the composition of each iconographic source. The paintings were exhibited in Italy, at Spazio E_Emme in Cagliari, along with mixed media artworks, which expanded the idea of hybrid objects in the exhibition space. A small artworks dedicated to a contemporary politician was also included in the exhibition.
Elio Ticca is a contemporary artist working with painting, sculpture and installation. His work aims to investigate how the representation of affect can be conceptually and culturally deconstructed, as well as narrated in new plastic and visual forms.