All invasions are barbarian… unspeakable acts of torture rido not only shake the conscience… they also do us harm. A crime within a crime, inhuman… an illegal plague which afflicts us.
Cruel and brutal torture. A young man screams, blindfolded… agitated dogs and other animals lunge at the body… a naked man, hooded, also blindfolded. The torture continues.
I try to draw the massacre. Everything the color of the earth, the central figure in purple, the torture victim in black. A large pair of scissors at his head. Too “literary” perhaps, too descriptive… Will I manage to make my style, my trade, recognizable? I must soften the brutality of the message, while remaining faithful to… Pozzati… even though barbarism is not part of my being. I can no longer cling to irony or elegance… it is catastrophic, unsettling, tragic, and the figures are born from a ferrous black. Two large paintings that will not open a long cycle, because these acts of barbarism, seen in the media, must no longer be seen, even if they are only concealed. Another bandaged figure, the torturer, a mannequin with no arms and a hood he wears like a beard; in the middle, a kind of black puppet on a pedestal, with electrical wires dangling from his hands… digital signals. Again white scissors, arrow, dagger. I try another, smaller: entirely in pyrographed skin-leather.
I smell the foul odor of the skin burning on the pyrography… it is nauseating… a demonic tattoo.
The screaming boy is still there, another is on his knees, a monkey, another beast, a head almost skull-like, a puppet with long teeth… all superimposed, the mark engraved on the skin confuses the various forms… only the scissors are recognizable, open ready to strike.
TOR-TURE… torture… the painting is torture. As I paint I have an awareness of pain. How can we paint the drama of torture in a “low voice”? A scream strangled on the last bristle of the brush. I can add no fantasy to these ghosts… the facts are there, so cruel I can add nothing more. We need only watch… draw… anguish merges with the sign… everything is reduced to tragedy… a tragedy the painter can not obliterate. These images do not evoke silence, but an irritation that causes sickness and malaise. Perhaps it is only an attempt at self-protection… painting is salvific, taking revenge on he who wounds and he who wants to wound you… but painting does not tolerate.
Concetto Pozzati 2004