MAURETANIA AND LUSITANIA

1987

 

These drawings, engravings carefully colored in pastel, appear to cite famous examples of photomontages and collages from the golden age of the “Radical” movement (Hollein, Peintner, Superstudio, etc.). In reality, they are less a “nostalgic” reference to those years of linguistic and conceptual experimentation (although this is certainly ironically present), than the discovery of an “advertising technique” used by Cunard Lines for the new transatlantic liners Mauretania and Lusitania, whose dimensions were compared, in Cunard posters, with those of the most celebrated monuments in the history of architecture, from the pyramid of Cheops to St. Peter’s, from the Parthenon to the Houses of Parliament in London and from the Capitol in Washington to the Colosseum. A discovery that only required the underscoring of a coloring, an operation that rendered the image at once more up to date and more surreal.