25 drawings, paper, ink, wood frame, 42 x 29,5 cm each drawing
Seances (After disasters of war) is a series of drawings inspired by Francisco Goya's engravings on the Disasters of War. Between 1810 and 1815, the Spanish painter took the risk of showing in all their cruelty the atrocities of which human beings are capable in collective situations.
Hubert Czerepok pays tribute to these engravings by using the same black backgrounds and fine lines that characterize them. However, the figures of suffering bodies are taken from different situations. The artist created his drawings from a collection of existing media images related to tragic current events, séances, and sexual scenes. In this way, he questions the manifestation of power embodied through the media and the control of information. This process is reminiscent of the work of American artist Andy Warhol, who created the Death and Disaster series in the 1960s. As with Pop icons, Warhol reproduced images of everyday disasters taken from newspapers in silkscreen prints. He graphically intensified the violence, thereby highlighting the superficiality of the media.
In the Seances series, Hubert Czerepok does not choose to reproduce the images identically; through the practice of drawing, he revisits the aestheticized and mass-produced violence, attempting to turn it against its traumatic and critical power.
