FIRING TARGETS

Monotypes on industrial drawings on tracing paper

The series Firing Targets was made using technical drawings on tracing paper from a former aircraft factory. These documents contained turbine diagrams intended for fighter aircraft. Removed from their original industrial function, they become the grounds for monotypes in which black ink gradually covers, disrupts or absorbs the underlying technical lines.

The resulting images immediately evoke aerial views: dark territories, scorched surfaces, expanses of smoke, craters or devastated landscapes seen from above. The deep blacks of the monotype produce a dense, almost oil-like substance, recalling some of the images broadcast during the Gulf War—particularly the bombed and burning oilfields seen through satellites or onboard cameras.

Between abstraction and representation, the forms remain deliberately ambiguous. The eye hesitates between military cartography, aerial photography, gestural painting and accidental imprint. The old industrial drawings sometimes persist beneath the ink, like buried structures or technical remnants engulfed by catastrophe.

The choice of tracing paper is essential to the series. Its fragile transparency retains a spectral quality: the images seem to hover between appearance and disappearance, between mechanical precision and the dissolution of matter. Layers overlap and blur, creating unstable depths reminiscent of radar or thermal imagery.

Pursuing questions raised by Paul Virilio’s reflections on the relationships between technology, vision and war, Firing Targets examines how contemporary conflicts transform our perception of landscape. Territory becomes a distant image, observed through systems of surveillance, reconnaissance or destruction.

Yet, as is often the case in my work, the intention is not to illustrate a particular historical event. Instead, the images seek to bring forth a diffuse memory of the technologies of war and the systems of control inscribed in the contemporary landscape.

Through these dark, dense and silent surfaces, Firing Targets composes a series of mental landscapes in which abstraction meets the violence of the real, and traces of industry, the military gaze and catastrophe continue to haunt the image.