Photo courtesy of the artist
“In war, people don’t fight people, symbols fight symbols,” Che Guevara once said. Artist Mariano Favetto took this idea literally when he used it as the basis for his series, ‘Banderas de Paz’ (Flags for Peace), currently showing at Infinit’s exhibition space in Palermo. His flags combine those of countries in conflict, to create one flag out of two. Or in some cases, such as the conflict of former Yugoslavia, he combines up to five different ones.
“If flags can divide so strongly, they can also unite,” he says. He fused the flags, not just by overlaying them, but by creating new ones from the combined elements of the originals. “Some flags fit perfectly, suggesting how easy peace and unity might be. Others clash violently and never seem to find balance or stability.”
‘Banderas de Paz’ is full of naïve optimism, which Favetto consciously embraces. “It is an attempt to simplify the most complex problems to try and find a solution,” he explains. “These flags seek to create change, to make you think about your flag, your life, your world and what you can do to make it better.”
Photo courtesy of the artist
Asked how people responded to the work he replies: “There were people who thought that the reaction would be like that of ‘The Satanic Verses’. But until now there hasn’t been anyone who has complained about them. No one has said that they were offended. On the contrary, people seem to like them a lot.”
Indeed, it is difficult not to warm to Favetto’s mix of innocence and cheekiness. He describes how, when exhibiting in France, many Franco-Lebanese people responded favourably to his controversial ‘Syrihebanon’ flag (a fusion of the flags of Hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon and Syria). Neither did he get a single bad reaction either when he exhibited the ‘Afghanistates’ flag in New York.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Favetto’s other works also use instantly recognisable international icons mixed in a similarly irreverent way. ‘From piety to impiety via Ernesto’, for instance, is a spectrum of graphically rendered heads that morph from Adolf Hitler to Che, to Jesus in nine steps.
Mariano calls it: “A scale that investigates the degrees of good and evil,” explaining: “When I first tried to imagine what a cross between Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler would look like, Che appeared immediately.” He cites the famous quote: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
Considering his bold visual style, it comes as no surprise that he started off in the world of advertising. After working for Saatchi and Saatchi for seven years, he felt that he had many ideas that did not fit into publicity campaigns, so he decided to take a break from advertising in order to carry them out.
Photo courtesy of the artist
The result is that his work borrows from the language of ads and popular culture, and appeals to those who may not see themselves as necessarily interested in art. “In publicity all the messages need to be self explanatory,” he says. “Whereas in art, to be able to understand the message you need to be able to know about the artist. It’s much more complex. I want to make art that works without explanation.”
Whilst some of the popular icons he plays with are international, some are rooted in his native land. In a series of works inspired by the vast planes of the Argentine pampas, he takes the flatness of the landscape to its ultimate extreme, stretching a single column of pixels from a digital image to create a series of horizontal lines.
Photo courtesy of the artist
“The idea of these landscapes is that they should be abstract. With the flat, wide scenery of the Argentine pampas it is not difficult to find a part that represents the whole, but what is interesting and revealing is the liquid-metal-like quality of the resulting images – something between a heat haze and a high speed train,” he explains.
“A picture equals 1,000 words,” says Mariano. “A two megabyte digital picture equals 1,920,000 pixels. So if 1,920,000 pixels equals 1,000 words, one pixel equals 0.000520833 words.”
Mariano went on to give the same treatment to famous paintings such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’, Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’, and Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’. He tried to recreate the composition, the colour palette and the figures as much as he possibly could with a one-pixel column. There is something uncanny about the results, where the viewer hovers on the border between recognising and not recognising the painting in its new form. He strips away all the detail to leave a symbol of the work.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Continuing in the same vein, the next work that he plans is a version of Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’, a set of paintings that the French artist designed to de displayed 360-degrees around an oval shaped room in the Orangerie in Paris. “I plan to recreate the piece using the technology of today, that Monet didn’t have, and to introduce other elements such as sound,” Favetto says.
Despite borrowing from and reworking art from various other periods in history his strongest influences are the pop artists of the 50s and 60s such as Warhol and Lichtenstein, who speak about popular culture through their art. After that he professes a love of Picasso, since he considers that he was responsible for changing the role of the artist into that of a star, and transforming the relationship between art and culture.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Much of Favetto’s inspiration, however, comes from closer to home, from his children. “Little kids have an amazing imagination. My son made a figure out of a squash, and now, based on that, I’m doing a project, making a Stanley Kubrick-style world but in which everything’s made out of squash. Picasso said that he worked all his life to be able to achieve a childlike vision.
“Someone once told me that an artist is someone who wants to create a better world,” Favetto says, when asked what the role of an artist should be. “I felt that I identified with this much more than any formal description, since I am not an artist that depends on teaching and the repetition of a technique. In my work, I try to create a questioning about the way in which we are programmed, and to present the vision of a better world.”
‘Banderas de Paz’ shows at Infinit boutique as part of a series of shows in their ‘Espacio de Artes Múltiples’, Thames 1602, Palermo. Visit Infinit’s website for more information on the series www.infinit.la. The show runs until the beginning of August. For more information on the artist’s work, visit www.favetto.890m.com
