French photographer and visible artist Leo Caillard has a lofty assignment: to reinvigorate the museum-going public’s experience and with the aid of extension reanimate our engagement with artwork. In our picture-saturated age, where flicking through photos on our virtual screens has to turn out to be 2d nature, traveling a museum typically approach shifting from art work to paintings in a count of seconds so one can devour as many stimuli as viable. The end result, as Caillard explains, is that “people start to lose the potential to mirror on what they may be looking at.” this is the impetus behind “Heroes of Stone”, a photographic collection of marble and bronze busts of exceptional heroes surreptitiously provided in a museum context.
Photoshopped into the Louvre’s series, Caillard’s digital sculptures stand next to classical figures of Greek-Roman deities, emperors, and philosophers, confounding the visitors on the grounds that they appear each very acquainted and out of place. Depicting iconic amazing heroes which include Iron guy, Flash, Batman, Spiderman and Superman, the busts emulate now not best the bodily characteristics of the historical sculptures but additionally the grandeur and thoughtfulness of their demeanor, right down to their majestic gaze and somber expression, as they possibly ponder the way to save the area or establish world peace.
by means of seamlessly merging the present day and the historic in such an sudden, playful style, even as Caillard’s pics improve questions on popular culture’s mythological fame and artwork’s place in present day society, extra importantly, they call for the viewers’ interest, by way of jolting them out in their visual stupefaction and asking them to seriously bear in mind what they’re looking at and by way of extension reexamine their cultural and social environment.
This isn’t always the primary Louvre-based totally challenge for Caillard whose previous work consist of “Hipster in Stone”, where classical sculptures were digitally dressed inside the brand new hip style, “Hipster in Bronze” which featured a chain of classical busts trendily accessorized, and “artwork game” whereby paintings inside the museum have been proven displaying navigation factors from iTunes, iOS and Mac OS X. similarly to “Heroes of Stone”, these images “might not be real, however”, as Caillard eloquently says, “they’re true”; at least they may be at some point.
