Simon Fujiwara Who's Lost in a Sea of Images, 2024

Simon Fujiwara's Who's Lost in a Sea of Images belongs to the artist's series of works recreating iconic art works by famous, historically significant artists through the perspective of his cartoon figure Who the Bær.

Executed in acrylic, charcoal, and pastel on canvas, Fujiwara's large scale-work draws on Théodore Géricault's monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa from 1819 which depicts the survivors of a shipwreck adrift in the aftermath of the 1816 wreck of the French Royal Navy frigate the Medusa, which ran aground off the coast of Senegal. Because of a shortage of lifeboats, some 150 survivors embarked on a raft and were decimated by starvation during a 13-day ordeal, which descended into murder and cannibalism. Only a handful remained when they were rescued at sea.

Fujiwara has adapted the motif and portrays multiple likenesses of the Who the Baer figure in a sequence that appears animated, even cinematic. Here the starvation relates to media as well and the character focuses on their mobile phone and are, as the work's title suggests, lost in the world of images.

Index
Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819, Musée du Louvre, Paris