In April 26, 2021, 35 years after the nuclear accident occurred on the night of April 26, 1986 at 1:23:45 am, cultural organization Art Company presents the VR project “CHERNOBYL 35 years later“, by visual artist Desiderio, curated by Chiara Canali.
One of the most serious human and environmental disasters in human history. More than thirty thousand dead. One hundred cities and villages emptied. Five million people destined to be subjected to medical checks. Thousands of malformed infants across Europe. 2,800 square kilometers of water, flora and fauna contaminated forever.
In order to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl tragedy, Desiderio has created a VR project entitled CHERNOBYL 35 Years Later, which brings together a series of film shorts and paintings made in 2009 on the occasion of the Apocalypse Wow! at the Marco Testaccio art museum. The paintings simulate, in a post-apocalyptic light, a planet recently ravaged by devastating destruction, in which a giant snail moves slowly, ridden by the artist wearing a gas mask.
Specifically, the works in the Chernobyl series materialize the effects generated on humanity by radioactive contamination through a pictorial sequence of portraits depicting infants holding two-headed pets or suffering from particular genetic duplication diseases. The horror and devastation caused by human error are opposed to the childlike naivety of a juvenile universe that considers the deformed beings presented in the works as “pets”.
The Desiderio’s painting is utopian and visionary and proceeds by flashback and flash-forward, just as it happens in the language of video; he often creates compositional spaces resembling real cinematographic sets, artificial theaters, which become expressive metaphors through which Desiderio criticizes the faults and errors of the past, with the hope that they will not be perpetuated in the future.