By the Artist : 

“It's at the battlefield of everything, that a frontline magnificent steamed out the ghosts. Shaping clouds in symmetry, over the land that lost its hopes. Again yet again and then again, being, and then becoming, forever more, afresh, once more.”

In this work ,I wanted to produce a painting following the “history painting” tradition .The work was produced during the first series of lockdown procedures. It was a very intense period for reflecting on the past, the now and the future. I had the need to make sense of the times I was living through. The macro to micro ideological conflict that I felt are reshaping the global order; what I imagined as “the battlefield of everything”.

I planned the horizontal canvas format as a political spectrum, and a world map where I would paint a metaphorical landscape. I painted in the clash of the two dominant economical powers by depicting China’s economical dominance as the pink glaze, which was referencing the Chinese “famille rose” porcelain (a significantly popular Chinese/Jesuit product produced and exported to western market during the 18 century). Overlapping that is a olive green sky inspired by the west’s arms trade and dollar gold domination. This was illustrated as the base background of the painting, the general atmosphere, the macro. On a micro level I illustrated the clashes and political upheavals that were taking place everywhere, government versus revolutions, nationalism versus globalism, left versus right, institutions versus collective, wealthy versus poor etc. On a local level, I illustrated the local dominant power’s resistance of the progressive rebellion narrative, and the export and depletion of talent under severe economical and political drought. The work is a painterly exercise, in which I wanted to represent the turmoil, on different scales, with emphasis on the traditional and the modern, in hope of mirroring the intense global and local events taking place prior to this painting.