Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol is the most important representative of American Pop Art. No artist has been able to embody the contradictions of the United States like Andy Warhol.
Observing the evolution of the United States in the watermark of his work means retracing the great thematic series that have characterized his production, from the early years of his New York production to the year of his death, trying to make the images of rotogravure divism interact with journalistic news and with the common objects of consumer society.
If, as in a famous aphorism by Warhol, "Pop art is loving things", in order to understand American aesthetics it is necessary to go back to observing the "things" of Pop Art. The famous "Campbell's Soup" and the "Brillo Boxes" are returned to the viewer in their trompe l'oeil reality or, even better, as monumentalisations of the newspaper considered in its iterative, serial triviality.
Behind the impersonality of the copy and the silkscreen is hidden, however, also that laboratory and "artisan" conception of artistic production that Warhol will never deny as for example in the beautiful series of Flowers paintings with bright colors, which never wilt.
It is here, it is in the pulsating and obsessive colour of the petals that the aesthetics of Pop begins to manifest something like a dark side, a poisonous or carcinogenic component that assails it from the inside and disintegrates it and that will take on the appearance of individual death and collective tragedy elsewhere.
In fact, observing America through Warhol means looking into the eyes the events that upset the chronicle and history: from the series dedicated to the Most Wanted Men a Gun, from Knives to the series of electric chairs, to the images of John Kennedy's assassination. "Pop comes from the outside", warns the artist, who re-frames, filters, decomposes and reassembles the media images in front of everyone's eyes, places an aestheticizing patina over them, which at the same time sails and reveals traits that are not immediately perceptible.
