AlphaDesigner Blogue

This one of my many collaborations with photographer Manel Ortega. It took me almost a year to complete. It’s a depiction of Lucifer and his alleged fall. Or - if you prefer - Pan and his alleged ascent. Whatever you choose, you won’t be wrong.

Myths have the power to morph and change as they travel from culture to culture and this one is among the most striking examples. Most of us know Lucifer (or Satan) through the various writings of the Abrahamic religions - Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Although his representation differs in each of them, as a whole, he appears in a negative aspect and in some cases is the antipode of the monotheistic God.

This seems as a paradox to me because if God is all-powerful then Satan shouldn’t be able to have any influence over God’s creations. However, we see this is not the case and Satan’s strength is so profound that he’s able to lead humanity into temptation and suffering. It’s a trap in which any monotheistic belief would fall because the notion of monotheism with its single, almighty deity directly opposes human intuition. And what human intuition says is that good and evil exist simultaneously and need each other as opposites.

Of course the subject of this post is not to clarify the plethora of religious contradictions but it’s important to mention because one conclusion that can be derived from all this charming nonsense is that Satan in monotheism actually relates to nature as it really is and God relates to nature as it should become in some point in the future, as we modify ourselves and our surrounding according to special prescriptions. This is quite apparent if we think about the most common depictions of Satan - horns, hoofs, a tail, hairy body… Did I hear Pan? And what does Pan stand for? Nature of course. In its most unapologetic aspect.

It’s funny but this artwork was started backwards - I began with the Pan idea and I ended up with Lucifer. I wanted to make some kind of a sequel to Atlas which had the heaven-vs-earth conflict at its core. Here, heaven is broken and nature is… as they say… king. :)

There’s something very powerful in that colour and I always knew it. And here’s the proof. It happened some days ago as I was ordering my Kraftwerk collection. I was searching for some details about the Mensch Maschine album and the first place that I visited was of course Wikipedia. Along with the other stuff, the article contained some information about the cover artwork, which was criticized for having a fascist undertones at the time the album came out. However, as the author noted, it’s actually more related to the early, pre-war Soviet art:

Communist imagery of the inter-war period of the Twentieth Century used limited production techniques (hampered by limited supply of inks and primitive printing processes) and so they ended up with a distinct, orange/red, black and white colour scheme with sharp lines and blocky shapes. This technique gave a cold, brash and brassy look to the work. Combined with the agitprop messages of socialistic eastern bloc countries, the imagery had power to it.

I have some doubts whether the actual “limited supply” was the main factor that influenced the early Soviet aesthetic, or it was the philosophy of Constructivism itself but whatever the truth is, nobody can deny the raw power it implies.

The art from that time had straightforward, simple messages, and the attitude resembles the modern, post-60’s advertising techniques where little is always more and every letter has a “price”. This simplicity provoked almost immediate reaction and in addition, the red colour provided a “visual anchor” to make the overall effect even more powerful.

The poet-artist Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rodchenko worked together and called themselves “advertising constructors”. Together they designed eye-catching images featuring bright colours, geometric shapes, and bold lettering. The lettering of most of these designs was intended to create a reaction, and function on emotional and substantive levels - most were designed for the state-run department store Mosselprom in Moscow, for pacifiers, cooking oil, beer and other quotidian products, with Mayakovsky claiming that his ‘nowhere else but Mosselprom’ verse was one of the best he ever wrote.

As far as I know, this is the birth of the modern cult of simplicity, an aesthetic which got so widespread and universally accepted that it’s very difficult to recognize its roots or what exactly caused it - the political or the economical desire to “unite” the people (or the customers, respectively).

I’ve never been a big fan of simplicity but it was interesting to experiment with it and I can say I’m pretty satisfied with the results. All of the six artworks were made in a single day, the main goal was to stick to a set of restrictions - the shapes had to be as simple as possible and their number had to be limited. In the end, the only real colour had to be red (if we assume black and white aren’t, which is actually true). For the themes, I used a collection of songs by Rammstein.

Summer is almost here and ahead of it arrives the next Raster chapter. And in a true Rasterian manner, we celebrate sunshine with a set of darker tones and moods.