New European Model
oil on board
70 x 76 cm
2015
'New European Model' is such a powerful statement on our contemporary condition of economic collapse, unending wars, terrorism, and forced mass migration on an unimaginable scale, it might be considered in the set of the most significant artworks to have been made in the recent period.
Capitalism is obviously in terminal crisis, and the antagonisms and contradictions it cannot escape from are affecting billions of people across the planet. The greatest works of art do not predict the future. They are not prophecy. But always extrapolate from the particular to the general for anyone with eyes to see.
The 'New European Model' of the bourgeois is the same as the old European model. 'War is the normal condition of Europe' to paraphrase Lenin unless Capitalism is overthrown and the world of humanity reorganised on a rational basis. For if it is not, we are all the subjects of this overwhelmingly harrowing 21st Century vision."
JF - 2016