In the occasion of World AIDS Day (December 1, 2019) the CICERO association, Mairie12 in collaboration with the Center for Urban Art Fluctuart invited OZMO to create a new work in the 12th arrondissement of Paris.
This artistic intervention is part of the Le Mur12 project, as a special initiative to create a dialogue about the subject and raise awareness of the cause.
The Italian artist is a forerunner of languages/mediums of expressions and styles, appreciated and recognized internationally for his research and his ability to create murals specific to the current place and time in order to build a dialogue with the local contexts and situations. For this particular project Ozmo managed to achieve the typical aesthetic characteristics of an oil painting, using spray cans in just over 4 days of creation of the ‘the Dream of San-Sebastiano’.
At the center of the pictorial scene he paints reinterpreting the Saint Sebastian by Rubens. The body of the Holy rescuer of the sufferers and protector against all viruses, once invoked for the plague and ultimately AIDS, is depicted lying down, within reach of passers-by. He is pierced by arrows, his attributes and allegories of contagions and epidemics, wrapped and crossed by a red thread like the blood that continues destructuring the entire composition. The pixel effect applied to his face on the one hand subtracts his subjective identity, and on the other hand reminds us of the peculiarity of human suffering, as it is not excluding anyone. Two pop elements taken from a famous late 1980s French cartoon ‘Il était une fois… la Vie’ are closing the composition. They are viruses that flee chased by elements that in the comic strip represented white blood cells, the protectors of the human body.
comment