Camouflage (2011)
OIL PAINTING
With Camouflage, Tom Liekens recreates a large-format canvas in oil and acrylic (210 x 500 cm) from 2010. During the period when he includes both that work and a variant in his solo exhibition Chaos reigns, he also brushes this copy to scale. In the middle of an apocalyptic landscape lies a pile of plastic toy soldiers. Seemingly indifferent to this pile of dead bodies, other figures continue to march left and right against each other, pelting each other with guns and grenades. The original painting is an almost grotesque enlargement of a battlefield from a boy's room: the archetypal miniature soldiers assume life-size proportions, depicting the artificial struggle of man, who all too often lives in conflict not only with nature, but also with his own species. Reduced to a smaller scale, the composition in this panoramic arrangement loses none of its oppressive menace, nor the powerful indictment that results from the primary act of painting.