This painting is a part of “Modern Heroes” series that I exposed several times now. Gareth Bale is a football player that now has some difficulties at his current club Real Madrid. When I painted him, several years ago, he was in his prime. He was supposed to become the best player in the world, but he eventually failed. So this painting was a kind of premonition of his decay. There was this image when he kicked the ball that he looked like crucified Jesus. So, that was the spirit of this series of mixing up ages, ideas, mentalities, facts and people that resemble each other or have common features. So here he was “Jesus Bale”. That was the first name for this work. However, later people were kind of confused of it, especially the religious ones. So I eventually decided to take the cross off and not offend their religious feelings. But the thorns crown is still there.
The background text is extracted from my book “The Basics of Theoretical Art” and it goes like this:
“Once with avalanching industrialization of both the journalistic item from traditional art and the mode item from modern art, the only one who has kept its traditional elitism is the conceptual item. As the mode item, the conceptual one is also not new in art history. It can be found in the traditional art, even if somewhat more diluted and hided. The art evolution from the darkness of history until today progressively revealed the concept and the scientific data involved among the artistic forms. That is because the civilization is evolving towards a scientific and pragmatic ideology, rejecting more and more the religious one that represents a certain stage in its history. Obviously, the two spiritual phenomena can not be radically differentiated: the religion and the science have common elements but the difference between them is the same as that between the archaic and Formula 1 cars.
That is why, today, the culture is more theoretical (or pragmatic - see the phenomenon of advertising) even when it makes the apology for Edenic childhood and returning to simple happiness of the primitive spirit. For example, the trends like romanticism, neoclassicism and realism have brought great technical and technological innovations of the image. But the main difference between them is the very journalistic item, the chosen story. The neoclassicism returned to mythology or gave mythological aura to the present. The romanticism oscillated between heroic and fatalistic -entropic themes. The realism was pleased to simply show the banal beauty of the world that previous art was not interesting in. In addition to journalist item that is the decisive factor in shaping these trends, here can be foreseen the very conceptual item. Each one of these currents has its own ideology. The neoclassicism is close to classical and Christian philosophy. The romanticism relates to the psychologist side of the ancient sophists and, obviously, it is announcing or even it is contemporary with Nietzsche (as the composer Richard Wagner for instance). The realism relates with the political side of the ancient sophists, with J.J. Rousseau and K. Marx. The conceptualist core found in these art currents will be even more visible later, once with their modernizing, when the romanticism will turn into surrealism (via ‘metaphysical painting’) and the realism will turn (among others) into socialist realism in communist countries or consumerism in capitalist ones.”
