Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Project made originally for EV + A Biennial (Limerick, Ireland) in 1994, and in 2012 for the exhibition “What to think, what to desire, what to do” (CaixaForum, Barcelona)

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is the title of an oil painting preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium and long thought to be the work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. On the box there are two separate poems of William Carlos Williams and WH Auden. The subject matter is the story, which tells Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Icarus, who managed to fly with wings made of feathers held together with wax, but in his flight came so close to the sun that the wax melted, and fell into the sea drowned.

During the war between England and Ireland and full European revolutionary wave (1917-1923), the Soviet Limerick on April 15, 1921 was proclaimed. Labor unions and the Irish Labour Party declared a general strike, printing its own currency and imposing fixed the price staples. The revolutionary experience lasted only twelve days.