One more for the road

  

This is the first of my 4 handmade artworks submitted to the Talenthouse "Blade Runner 2049" contest. Ridley Scott and a Warner Bros jury selected the best five artworks inspired by the upcoming sequel directed by Denis Villeneuve, starring Harrison Ford reprising his role as Deckard and Ryan Gosling as a rookie Blade Runner.

 I think the high secrecy enveloping the plot of the movie has made harder for the partecipants to figure out a relevant visual concept. That's why I've created a more surreal yet plausible image by using the Deckard's jukebox (shown in an early featurette) projecting the holographic faces of the actors around the "mnemonic" globe, hinting at the "musical" enigma of reality and memory. I still don't know if the fact an awful child scribble on Talenthouse got more support than this and the other 3 artworks is an amusing or depressing statement about the perception of art and creativity on line.

 Moreover, having just seen the winners of the Talenthouse contest, I've realized that joining this kind of "competitions" has no point at all (beside getting the chance to figure out some new specific movie-based art). 

All the art contests with money reward that I've joined over the years were won by friends or relatives of the jury (that's how it generally works in Italy, where you have to make sure to have the right affiliations even before starting to dream about becoming an artist).

Anyway, I'm glad that at least an oil painting has been selected (that one by the talented Nicky Barkla)

My personal reward is that no artist have thought about using the holographic jukebox as a way to "symbolize" and provide a conceptual frame to the traditonal composition of "actors faces" in order to underline the ambiguity between artificial and real. Indeed, despite the technical skills, the winners look like "replicants"of the same poster pattern.

No doubt it has been a very tough job for the jury to select only 5 works from the sheer amount of excellent submissions. Nevertheless the lack of variety in visual ideas makes you think that the rules of the contest should have clarified that they just wanted "alternative posters featuring the actors" (possibly made with vexel art by Philippine designers, that's a more elegant way to call photomanipulation) instead of "artworks inspired by", a word that defines a far more creative and open-minded approach than simply re-assembling photobased faces with glaring neon-like colors.

Well, at least I know that I've spent 8 days on a real rough canvas with real brushes painting with real greasy oil colors watching it with my real eyes. 

As Deckard says in the new movie"I know what's real!" (am I a Nexus 7?). 

Checked and cleared! Have a better one!