Assange Portrait

Federico Lombardo joins Artists for Assange with a digital portrait of Julian Assange. He lives and works in Ciampino-Rome.

"Federico Lombardo's digital portraits, inspired by the Renaissance model, are new icons of ideal beauty strongly characterized...... these technological images are the concrete result of the concept of hyperreality, expressed by Jean Baudrillard, as "a reality that has neither origins nor reality". Alien and alienating, they destabilize the very notion of reality, which suffers the danger of losing reliability and no longer being believed. Lombardo uses the tools of his time to analyze the changes in recent forms of representation due to digital evolution, attracting the viewer with the appeal and simulation of painting and photography. His works are a perfect example of transgressive seduction, due to the immediate sensory connection with painting that exists behind the artificiality of representation. First of all, they are virtual portraits of an existential condition, free from any decorativism and cultural references that could place them in a specific era. Splendid and disturbing, they project a humanity presumably replaced by a more perfect copy of the original, to appear as the result of a memory that could be. increasingly convincing images move away from the traditional representation where the concept of history prevailed, to leave room for the simulation assumed to reorganize the same representation based on the rules and laws of the past. In this case the artist has produced with great lucidity a type of art that questions art."
— Nikla Cincolani