Icons to Mammon

Work: Icons to Mammon.

Collages of banknotes on paper, oil, 22 carat gold leaf

Location:

Le Cailar, France. 2023.

Reference text:

I do not have the talent of Pacôme Thiellement for exegesis of popular culture, far from it. However, I recently remembered that the infamous Charles Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons lived on Mammon Street. In the New Testament, Mammon is the personification of wealth. Not that understood in the positive sense – the wealth of knowledge or friends – but rather greed, pleonexia. The accumulation of cold hard cash having become the religion of the moment, my interest in applying gold leaf and gluing banknotes gave me the idea of making small objects of devotion to glory of this Mammon, passed from the New Testament to an American cartoon. I took the form of the traditional Orthodox icon by replacing the holy figure with one that usually illustrates our paper money, I took my tubes of oil paint out of the cupboard and I started painting. stain while muttering some made-up prayers. Since then, I have been waiting.