Wall of fame - particular

Twenty-six faces representing the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, the absolute core of written communication. Amongst the faces of famous people like Yuri Gagarin, Jimi Hendricks, Frida Khalo, Sergio Leone – to name a few -, JBROCK has interposed the faces of six people very close to him, starting from his family members. Family and close friends are the primary cell of what will become our communicative instinct, the laboratory in which our minds learn to assign an evocative value to the face of another human being. In his artworks the communicative power of a face becomes a moment of reflection on the iconic strength and evocative value a face is able to transmit; whatever emotional charge it may carry with it. The alphabet depicted on Via dei Magazzini Generali reminds us that communication is key in contemporary society. It can be said that JBROCK’s open-air gallery of portraits reinterprets the concept and values found in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957). “Myth is language” writes Barthes, and the twenty-six portraits by JBROCK play with the double meaning communicated by the alphabet and myth itself. After all his wall is communicating through a Hollywoodian language. Like the Los Angeles walk of fame, it is fair to talk about a wall of fame when looking at JBROCK’s gallery of alphabetical portraits.