Making Faces / clip

Making Faces NFT videos have been created through thousands of photographic tiles reproducing parts of butterfly wings.

The same tiles have been used for the creation of the works of the series >> Puzzling Pop NFT and >> Puzzling Pop prints.

The sound used for the video animations consists of recordings of the flapping of hundreds of butterfly wings.

The Making Faces NFT series of thirty-three portraits is created through digital collages, with each portrait constructed from meticulously arranged photographic details of butterfly wings. The resulting animation is achieved through sequences of diverse compositions, bringing to life facial expressions—or rather, grimaces—that define each of the thirty-three characters.

These grimaces convey strong emotions and reactions. Each character alternates expressions of anger, uncontrollable laughter, embarrassment, surprise, sarcasm, and irony, capturing an intense emotional spectrum. But what prompts these expressions, these grimaces, in these thirty-three biblically named subjects?

According to the artist, these explicit facial expressions—his characters as extensions of himself—represent the natural reaction of that segment of the Western population that has not been clouded by the propaganda of mainstream media, which serve the interests of those powers controlling Western governments. Citizens are subjected to a continuous stream of misinformation, imposing a kind of “mass hypnosis.”

These thirty-three individuals, through their facial expressions, represent the minority that has not fallen prey to a pervasive cultural conditioning in which values such as freedom, democracy, peace, security, and equality, “promoted” by the dominant system, are in reality—like Orwellian doublespeak—used to express the exact opposite. Transhumanism, Political Correctness, Cancel Culture,  Woke Ideology, Gender Fluidity, Bio-Security, and Info Pandemics, Anthropogenic Climate Emergency, Falsely Green Policies, all work toward establishing a new moral order that excludes dissent, with social ostracism as its penalty.

A new language emerges, one designed to mask the neoliberal ideology of the global financial oligarchies, which govern through “democratic” consensus constructed via media control and the entertainment industry.

The characters portrayed in Making Faces have not been ensnared by the propagandistic narratives of the new neoliberal globalist system, and they express through sequences of grimaces their reaction to the brazen and grotesque distortion of reality and news served to them by the “Diffuse West,” a distortion that has accelerated sharply in the last three years. 

Some of the most striking examples are the fabrication of truths surrounding Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, the lies and fake news targeting the Kremlin throughout the conflict, and the shameful and immoral censorship of the criminal atrocities of the genocide of Palestinians carried out by the Israeli government.

As part of the Puzzling Project, the works Making Faces show a clear discontinuity in both form and content from the previous works in the series >> Puzzling Rennaisance and >> Puzzling Warhol, these characterized by an evident iconographic and formal research in the reinterpretation of Renaissance and Pop Art subjects. With the series of portraits Making Faces together with those of the >> Fantastic Portrait prints and >> Fantastic Portrait NFT series Morucchio expresses a series of works that are the result of a research that, while remaining in a "figurative" sphere, moves away from a simple aesthetic approach as an end in itself to use a language that is certainly more original and the bearer of concepts and contents that characterize any artistic expression that qualifies as contemporary.