"Give me more images" , by Erik Pevernagie, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm

What makes people tick?

For some, life is a trap of boredom, but the imagery is a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power of images can generate an inexorable addiction that has to be gratified. Here and now!

By becoming addicted to images, we have grown into an “iconoclastic” society, and people are, more and more, dependent on visual representations. They need the escapist and distracting effect of imagery.

Their imagination must be triggered day by day, as the monotony of daily life has to be set on fire, continuously, not tomorrow, but today. They don’t want their chaotic thinking disturbed.

As life is a decoy of boredom, they claim inflammatory, entertaining, dominant characters.

Since many are totally desensitized, they may adore gruesome scenes of cruelty and suffering. There is no fear of overexposure.

The fragmentation of our awareness may trigger dizzying vertigo in the chaos of our living. As such, an overwhelming flurry of connectivity and images generate, thereby, an oversaturation in our brain, and the overabundance makes us anxious, fractured and insecure. This might, in turn, actuate us to cut the wire with the world and stumble into an estranging and contentious cocoon of self-absorption, while off-loading the lush supply of social interaction.

Life becomes, then, an intricate maneuvering ground for walking a fine line between sound connectedness and crumbling consciousness, between unflinching cohesion and atomizing fragmentation.

Phenomenon: video and television

Factual starting point of the pictureː woman in front of tv