This was the second of three images I created on the theme of contemporary “hells”. Gluttony does not just refer to overeating but also to the idea of consumerism. This image is shown in the Palazzo Te in Mantua. It is one of my very favorite late Renaissance, (mannerist), buildings in all of Italy. I filmed a part of the National Geographic documentary, Masterpieces in Chalk in this palazzo before it was restored. One of the scenes was in the Room of the Giants. This room is painted floor and ceiling with a continuous scene of the “battle between the gods and the giants” from classical mythology. The room is only some meters from the loggia where Gluttony is shown in this image. Near Mantua a huge shopping center had recently been built with the name “Il Gigante”. So in the image there is a pun between the “giant” shopping center, the room of the giants and the gigantic proportions of the figures in the pavement art. The image is available as a limited edition print in my website store. Click here for more information.
Category Archives: 3D Pavement Art
This was the first of three images I created on the theme of contemporary “hells”. It collects all of the nightmares of a horrible office environment where the poor workers are attacked by the technology, surveilled and abused by some sort of boss that appears on multiple television screens. I created this image during the last year I lived in the province of Mantua. During the 18 years I lived there, a huge amount of the landscape was turned into shopping centers and commercial venues. Finally we got tired of the traffic and moved to a sleepier town in Umbria.
I was intensely aware of the negative effects of modernization in Northern Italy, which gave a lot of inspiration for these works. Also, office work was never a strong point for Italians and the amount of paperwork needed to operate a business has gotten way out of hand in all of Europe. The backdrop for the work consists of real public offices. They make perfect fit with their sterile and dehumanizing architecture, so different from the historical buildings. Even prisons were prettier.
This image is available as a limited edition print. Click here for more information.
I did this work for 2K sport at the E3 Expo, (the world’s premier trade show for computer and video games and related products), in Los Angeles. I had already done a work for the XBox game Gears of War a … Continue reading