Dripped: Paying an Animated Tribute to Jackson Pollock
Director and designer Léo Verrier has received multiple awards for this inspiring animation.
Every year, hundreds of works of art disappear from institutions and galleries around the world. Many of them will become tokens, presents which members of organized crime will use to seal alliances and close deals; others must wind up on the black market and, unfortunately, many of them will never be recovered. If only some of these lost works could become part of a fantasy like the one director Léo Verrier displays for us.
Dripped pays homage to Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), creator of the shapeless flesh, of movement and of the celerity of abstract expressionism. In his animation, Verrier invites us to 1940s New York, where an art thief does not wish to possess works to contemplate or profit from them; instead he preserves and devours them because they alter his body and spirit. The main character acquires the plastic powers of the works he engulfs, and gravitates in the fantasy that takes us back to the beginning of art, when magic and work were one and the same.
In his small apartment he possesses classic and modern works, and after devouring them, he decides to make his own painting —alluding, perhaps, to the references a visual artist nurtures from in order to create. After trying to digest his own still life, the frustrated creator reacts violently at the finding of the essence of his creation: the dripping, the creative seal that Pollock took to its limits.
Pollock’s work convulsed New York, the art capital of the second half of the 20th century. Critics like Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg wrote about a new tendency in art —painting should possess volume, body and strength, which had to move away from figuration to bring the viewer closer to the indecipherable lands of meditative contemplation. A painting that required a passionate and courageous nature that its two main exponents —Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock— possessed. These two creators defined the course of 21st century art.
With this piece we honor the work of someone who altered the vertical act of painting (on an easel) and took it to horizontality (the ground). Connecting with the art of the Earth, gravity and the viscosity of pain, Jackson Pollock transformed the world.
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