A Touch of Red

1991
Acrylic on wood
135 x 115 cm
Private collection, Mexico

“A Touch of Red” takes us into the museum. We become eyewitnesses to a pair of young visitors looking at a painting, a painted sculpture, which comes to life before the visitor’s eyes. It destroys itself by painting over itself … On a light grey wall hangs a painting, which in turn is a copy of an old work of art – the marble group “Apollo and Daphne” by the Roman-Baroque sculptor Lorenzo Bernini. Black is the background of the painting in the picture, the marble group painted in a calm grisaille technique. But the calm is disturbed. The raised arm of Daphne, which in Bernini’s sculpture is transformed into leaves according to the legend, here holds a painter’s scroll dipped in red paint. On the floor in front of the naked woman’s body plastic paint buckets. The triviality of objects from our everyday life violently takes possession of values of sacred art that were believed to be untouchable…”. (quoted from Alexander Rauch, in: exhibition catalogue KunstHausWien, 2005).