How a trip to IKEA unlocked a work of art

If you’ve been fol­low­ing close­ly the progress of the APEX project, then you already know this sto­ry. For every­one else I’ll make it short.

From the very begin­ning of the series I had this image in my head, and made sev­er­al sketch­es (see APEX on the pipeline).It was a nat­ur­al spin-off of the piece “Water”, pre­vi­ous­ly called “The swamp”, where I made a land­scape merg­ing New York and Lon­don’s sky­lines on the back of a croc which lied motion­less underwater.

For some rea­son I left it there; the piece seemed too ambi­tious and I lacked the tech­ni­cal clar­i­ty to address it. So I car­ried on with oth­er parts of the project.

How­ev­er, while vis­it­ing the Dublin Zoo, the piece was brought  back to my mind. A croc’s green and greedy pair of eyes look­ing from a posi­tion of pow­er (thank­ful­ly from behind a safe­ty glass) some­how elicit­ed my artis­tic ambi­tion… I had to give this one a try!

The tech­ni­cal prob­lems, of course, remained. How was I going to make a cred­i­ble Man­hat­tan back­ground and blend it with a per­fect­ly posi­tioned croc, as in the one of the pho­tos tak­en in the Zoo?

The first attempt, which I paint­ed in a small for­mat (60 x 80 cm), dis­ap­point­ed me. It was­n’t near­ly as crude­ly “in your face” as I had envi­sioned it. For the sec­ond time, I gave the idea fur­ther time to mature.

And then one day every­thing changed. I saw it imme­di­ate­ly, right there in front of me and a hun­dred more con­sumers: the raw mate­r­i­al and tech­ni­cal solu­tion alto­geth­er. It was even framed and ready to be placed in the trol­ley for check out…in the dec­o­ra­tion area of IKEA!

A motif repli­cat­ed and sold by the thou­sands in as many IKEA out­lets all over the globe, was going to become a unique base for that pow­er­ful but elu­sive idea. And so it was; I final­ly begun the painting…

Here’s the before and after. The “after” would even­tu­al­ly become the call­ing card and poster of the exhi­bi­tion, as I’m sure some of you’ve found out check­ing your recent post.