Naïve #44

The 2012 series began with the discovery of the colour white which Gabriel Wickbold had never used before. The strong, sometimes brutal images portray the cycle of life and put the human body and its ephemeral condition in the world in check, with man once again placed at the centre of the food chain. "Instead of being just the tip of the chain, in the position of one who just takes inordinately from the earth, I wanted to place man almost as a fertiliser for life, a fertiliser to start a reinterpretation," says Wickbold. "These reflections bring meaning to issues in my universe. I believe we have to build images that are aesthetically strong, but that possess an emotional meaning and provoke us." To arrive at the final result, the artist uses a sophisticated creative process. First, the model's face goes through a process of painting and cracking with a thick layer of paint, resulting from small movements of the face. Soon after this stage, it is necessary to sand down the excesses a few times and add elements found in nature. Birds preserved by the taxidermy technique, leaves, plants and other objects are juxtaposed to the models' white, fossilized skin. When he started the series, Wickbold used the bodies of models, and then settled only on their faces because he believes that the awareness between man and nature is very much linked to man's greed. And each of those heads was finding its own balance, which also leads to an interpretation that each of those images was seeking a balance in the relationship between man and nature. "The series showed different heads and different elements because nature is complex and I wanted to explore different levels of colour and the colour palette of nature. So we used from the simplest flowers and leaves to more far-fetched elements that require a little more technique without forgetting that all the processes were directly involved with photography," says Wickbold. Using this model as a support and once again reinforcing the idea of the man being an installation, the artist put his hand directly from the process. "I ended up increasingly letting go of the camera and going to the model to do the painting with my own hands, using photography more as a way to capture those images and freeze that moment to transform it into a painting."