PSICOLOR

ENAMEL ON CANVAS / ACRYLIC ON CANVAS.UNIQUE PIECES.

 

 

 

 

The diagnosis of a variety of mental conditions, as well as the massive consumption of drugs, is more common than we think. Their advertising through strategies similar to those of other types of products, are characteristics of the contemporary world that call our attention. We have found that both advertising, logos and institutional image of pharmaceutical companies, as well as medicines as such, have pictorial characteristics since their manufacture. The colors printed on the boxes and those assigned to pills of all kinds have a logic that obeys dynamics of various kinds: sales strategy, product restrictions, the brand of the producer, etc.

Mental illnesses as such are not attributed a specific color. In order to translate, into a visual language, the characteristics of both the pathologies and the associated drugs, we found that when searching on the Internet through Google Images, before the images are fully loaded on the screen, the system automatically performs a color synthesis. In this process, boxes appear that include the preponderant color of the corresponding image and the composition depends on the size of the images that will appear on the screen. With the initial concern and the aforementioned tool, we searched for psychiatric drugs of different kinds, as well as the pathologies or mental situations that these drugs are intended to cure.

We took this information to enamel and acrylic paintings in canvas “boxes” of different sizes, but in proportion to a cell phone screen. The acrylic paintings correspond to the pathologies and the enamel paintings, because of their industrial character, were applied to the works related to medicines. When we saw the result, we found that the paintings of medicines are very colorful, while those of diseases are opaque.

We chose painting as a medium, to seek a balance or counterbalance between the act of painting as a meditation or state of mind, and the origin of the works (disease / advertising / medication). Behind this “screen” is what a person with a mental illness suffers, suffers or carries.

 

This project is co-authored by Iván Cardona and Maria Jimena Herrera.
Production assistance Carolina Iannini