The West Suicide

The West Suicide. Puzzling Lucrezia Romana. The West and Lucretia:Crossed Destinies is the latest work in the >>> Puzzling Renaissance series, which since 2015 has seen Morucchio reworking classics of ancient painting using photographic tessellations that reproduce the mosaic pavement of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice.

This work is to be defined as “phygital” in that it is yes a physical print that through augmented reality allows the animation of which the physical image represents a still to be revealed. The work, a NFT clip video, 00:21 [check out >>> Opensea NFTs] is experienced through the use of a free downloadable augmented reality app; the visitors by framing the 100x40 cm print with a smartphone “transform” it into monitor playing the animation.

The value expressed till now by the works of the Puzzling Renaissance is the aesthetic and formal value constituted by the admirable arrangement of thousands of marble tesserae, fragments of geometric figures, animals and plants that, when combined, give life to physiognomies, volumes, bodies and faces.Until now, the creative impulse that has led Morucchio to revisit the works of Renaissance artists has had no other motivation than that of a purely aesthetic quest, devoid of those implications and themes of a social-political nature that have distinguished much of the Venetian artist's vast and proteiform production.

"Puzzling Lucretia Romana. The West and Lucretia: Crossed Destinies" goes beyond the realm of pure aesthetic research by loading itself with meaning: the depiction of suicide becomes a metaphor that resonates with our contemporaneity. To achieve this, the work transcends the limitation of a two-dimensional physical work by becoming animated thanks to Augmented Reality. The static posture of the portrait executed by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1530 is broken by the new Lucretia; her body now made up of thousands of mosaic fragments performs a movement caused by the cadenced substitution of tiles in each of the frames that create the animation. The dagger wielded by Lucretia for centuries, which has remained suspended freezing her self-harming intent, moves until it pierces the white marble tesserae that form her torso causing a trickle of other red marble fragments to gush out, impetuously becoming a flood that submerges her.

The myth of Lucretia Romana's suicide can be interpreted as a powerful visual metaphor for the "suicide of the West," particularly Europe, in relation to the rest of the world. A suicide assisted by an incompetent political class totally subservient to globalist and ultraliberal financial potentates that determine what Oswald Spengler, with foresight, called over a century ago the "Decline of the West."Spengler identified an "existential vacuum" in Western culture, based on money and manipulative cultural models, which reduce peoples' critical and analytical capacities, preventing them from reacting. From psychopandemic emergencies to those attributing rising global temperatures to anthropogenic activities and now with NATO's proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, the unidirectional propaganda of the Western mainstream leads us, stunned, toward a mad and precisely suicidal warlike escalation.

In sum, the myth of Lucretia Romana's suicide becomes a powerful metaphor for the decline of the West, caused by a combination of political incompetence, cultural manipulation, and propaganda leading to self-destructive choices on a global scale.