A tweet about destruction

A Tweet by William Turner about the destruction of Sodoma & Gaffa questions notions such as virility and populism, collective responsibility and fake news. A Trojan horse wears a Stars and Stripes tie between its legs, surrounded by male figures – including Donald Trump himself – somewhere between the Wild West, KKK and antiquity.

The gap between the real and reality as an imagined space is accentuated by the apocalyptic (and ironic) tonality and title of this composition.

This painting by Adam Adach is related to Joseph Mallord William Turner’s The Destruction of Sodom (1805), which in turn was inspired by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

By integrating Burke’s concept of the Sublime,Turner presents a terrifying but also wondrous spectacle. Even in his most impressionistic paintings, Turner was making reference to the political ambiguities of his time; and this was certainly the case in his depiction of God’s wrath against the city and its inhabitants. Adach playfully mixes up this timeless subject with another ancient yet unbiblical reference – the Trojan horse –, resulting in a critical allegory of the global 21^st century political and social turmoil. 

While making also a nod to Hieronymus Bosch through the profusion of details, a series of enchanting/disturbing paintings by Adam Adach can be read as metaphors of the democratic world as it is or as it may become.

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