The work exploits an extremely effective perceptual shift: what we immediately recognise as a toy – the plastic figures, the stereotypical poses, the small scale – is transposed into a pictorial dimension that radically alters its meaning.
The scene is not exactly playful, but is imbued with a suspended violence, almost as if it were embedded in the very surface of the paint. The orange background, warm and seemingly unnatural, does not depict a landscape but a state: it is earth, fire, compressed memory. The toy soldiers are arranged across this field, some still in combat positions, others already fallen, as if in a frozen choreography. Their outlines are never entirely defined; some seem to fade away or barely emerge, as if they were elusive memories.
The repetitive nature typical of toys is transformed here into a reflection on the standardisation of war, on its reproducibility and trivialisation – that is, the way in which it is learned, miniaturised and rendered harmless.
The work is imbued with an autobiographical tension that amplifies its impact. The shift from mediated knowledge to child’s play, and then back to painting, creates a short circuit: what symbolically instils a propensity for violence is internalised and rendered as an image. The work retains a deliberately unstable quality; the boundary between fiction and reality explores history, culture and politics, both past and present. The figures are no longer objects, but doubles, remnants, ghosts of an experience that cannot be fully processed, a memory that oscillates between game and trauma.