from Vermibus
Dissolving Europe is the new public art work that stormed Europe this year from Vermibus. Using a dubious inter-rail ticket, Vermibus set out with a set of 90 keys and his pallet of solvents to physically and temporally highjack the western world of advertisements in the name of fine art.
Each site is carefully deliberated with its environment, from Rolex boutiques, to archaic museums. The system looks simple in movement: unlock and roll the advertising poster to create a huge blank gleaming white breath of fresh air in the urban environment. The advert then undertakes the process of counter action painting using a series of solvents and brushes, it is then replaced in another site, another city, another country.
Berlin
based spanish artist Vermibus regularly collects advertising posters
from the streets, using them in his studio as the base material for
his work. There, a process of transformation begins. Using solvent,
he brushes away the faces and flesh of the models appearing in the
posters as well as brand logos. Once the transformation is complete,
he then reintroduces the adverts back into their original context,
hijacking the publicity, and its purpose.
The
gesture of erasing the images with solvent is similar to the gesture
of painting, but it is painting counter action. The process is the
same, but it is not adding colours on a canvas to create an image, it
is removing the colors of an existing photographic image to create a
new image and new characters. The models of the adverts have
mutated.There is something very organic about the emaciated creatures
that emanate from the billboards. The impersonal and sanitized
perfect bodies have turned into shadows or mummies that have much
more presence and singularity.
By
using the advertising space and how the human figures are represented
in that space, Vermibus is removing the masks that we wear and is
criticizing advertisement which takes away a person’s identity to
replace it by the one of the brand.
Vermibus’
art begins and ends in the street, which plays an essential role.
People stop, stare, are intrigued, take photos. Publicity adverts
show perfectly chiseled bodies and faces like in early ancient
Egyptian art. By manipulating the image through removing the flesh of
his subjects, Vermibus dehumanizes those figures that were already
depersonalized, but he is, in fact trying to find the aura of the
individual, the personality that was lost. The posters and models
that were so banal, are not so trivial anymore. People notice them,
and stop to look at them. They are not part of the background
anymore; they stand out in the public space.
Video:
Xar Lee, cargocollective.com/xar_lee
Music:
"A Painter's Journey"
Music Composer by Marcello De Francisci.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1232058/
Image Assistent:
Peter Grünheim - https://vimeo.com/33funk
Video Produced by: Vermibus, 2013 - http://www.vermibus.com