Romina Ressia
Pop - Corn , 2013
Archival pigment print.
This work emerges from the intersection of the elevated and the banal, the timeless and the fleeting. The image presents a woman visually constructed with references to classical painting, but an everyday element (a bag of popcorn) disrupts this scene of apparent nobility.
The contrast between the sublime and the trivial is not decorative but reflective: the Popcorn challenges today’s culture of consumption, not only of products, but also of images, bodies, symbols, and meaning itself.
Popcorn, a symbol of mass entertainment, here reveals the fragility of the symbolic structures that have historically idealized beauty, femininity, and art itself. What is the place of the banal within the “serious”? To what extent has contemporary visual culture emptied traditional imagery of meaning by endlessly replicating it without question?
From a gendered perspective, Popcorn raises questions about the representation of women, their passive role in art history, their aestheticization, and their transformation into consumable objects. The irony in the image does not aim to mock but rather to expose the tensions that persist between tradition and the present, between what is expected and what disrupts.
The use of digital photography, without manipulation, reinforces the commitment to real, tangible scene construction. This choice highlights the role of artifice as language, not as something false, but as something deliberate. In this sense, the digital is not the end, but a means to create a visual experience that dialogues with historical codes from a distinctly contemporary viewpoint.
This piece is part of a broader body of work that aims to stretch the boundaries between the high and the low, the real and the represented. It does not offer definitive answers; it proposes a pause, a reflection, and perhaps an uneasy smile in front of a scene that, despite its absurdity, feels strangely familiar.
This work emerges from the intersection of the elevated and the banal, the timeless and the fleeting. The image presents a woman visually constructed with references to classical painting, but an everyday element (a bag of popcorn) disrupts this scene of apparent nobility.
The contrast between the sublime and the trivial is not decorative but reflective: the Popcorn challenges today’s culture of consumption, not only of products, but also of images, bodies, symbols, and meaning itself.
Popcorn, a symbol of mass entertainment, here reveals the fragility of the symbolic structures that have historically idealized beauty, femininity, and art itself. What is the place of the banal within the “serious”? To what extent has contemporary visual culture emptied traditional imagery of meaning by endlessly replicating it without question?
From a gendered perspective, Popcorn raises questions about the representation of women, their passive role in art history, their aestheticization, and their transformation into consumable objects. The irony in the image does not aim to mock but rather to expose the tensions that persist between tradition and the present, between what is expected and what disrupts.
The use of digital photography, without manipulation, reinforces the commitment to real, tangible scene construction. This choice highlights the role of artifice as language, not as something false, but as something deliberate. In this sense, the digital is not the end, but a means to create a visual experience that dialogues with historical codes from a distinctly contemporary viewpoint.
This piece is part of a broader body of work that aims to stretch the boundaries between the high and the low, the real and the represented. It does not offer definitive answers; it proposes a pause, a reflection, and perhaps an uneasy smile in front of a scene that, despite its absurdity, feels strangely familiar.
180 x 120 cm
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