‘The fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour … to the producers, the social relations connecting the labours of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, thing-like relations between persons and social relations between things. To them their own social action takes the form of the action of things, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.’
— Karl Marx

‘The dreams have no dream. Just as the technicolour heroes do not allow us to forget for a second that they are normal people, type-cast public faces and investments, so under the thin tinsel of schematically produced fantasy emerges in unmistakable outline the skeleton of cinema-ontology, the whole obligatory hierarchy of values, the canon of the undesirable or the exemplary. There is nothing more practical than escape, nothing more fervently espoused to big business. We are abducted into the distance only to have the laws of empiricist living hammered from afar, unhampered by empirical possibilities of evasion, into our own consciousness. The escape is full of message, and message, the opposite, looks what it is: the wish to flee from flight. It reifies the resistance to reification.’
— Theodor Adorno


Dimitris Tzamouranis is one of the few contemporary artists willing to apply his craft to art’s often neglected role as a tool of aesthetic examination and cultural critique. His solo show Scarescapes, at the MMCA, speaks volumes on the state of contemporary painting and our shifting global society. The large format works, painted on copper panel and canvas, fuse the refined compositional techniques of contemporary German painting with penetrating, topical content. Carefully culled from news media and documentary photography, these potent images have been made as much at home in the representational space of the museum as they would be on the front page of any news outfit. But unlike their propagandistic counterparts, Tzamouranis’ works dissect visual process and meaning, systematically analysing those representational forms used to condense the vast ocean of mass media chaos into single, historically gratifying icons. The resulting works are grimly honest highlights of our global culture in decay, whose layered narratives force us to consider their intrinsic political message. In a particularly striking work, the shattered body of a cargo ship slumps against a barren coast line. Methodically rendered in soft metallic tones, the mood produced is one of bleak romance, as if gazing over the ruins of a vessel from a long lost civilisation. It is a work, which highlights the artists’ rare ability to capture, punctuate and judge recent history through rumination on poignant snap shots or freeze frames. Another piece slides into focus as a chaotic scene of refugees struggling to climb the debris of a sinking barge. It is an image ripped from the headlines, but here it has been transformed into a personal testament, reforming the wide breadth of modern exodus stories into a strikingly tangible visual narrative. Through the modifying effect of the painted medium these works manage to bypass our usual apathy and pull at our deeper sense of compassion. Their humanist message is clear and perhaps it is art like this, which in our age of global stoicism and ambivalence, has come to represent those deep emotional, even spiritual postures we require in order to process our collective feelings of responsibility for participating in such a brutal culture. Such effective contemporary art has even begun to replace these internal psychological processes with a form of external representation, in effect creating a novel commodity. Art, in our society, has evolved to take on the role of a nearly holy product, one which can transform intense or troubling ‘real life’ images and issues into objects more palatable for consumption and consideration. Fused into the art item itself, this nearly spiritual process has put the artist in the unique position to digest and regurgitate that hard reality most avoid. It has also removed the spectators from this personal process, obliging them to soak up the depth of such art objects as willing consumers of others’ catharsis. But beyond this placating effect, the devouring of such art has also given the artist a subtle power to sway political thinking, commenting on situations where silence and avoidance once seemed the only option.