Psicolor

Collaborative project between Iván Cardona and María Jimena Herrera who chose painting to carry out a plastic investigation that investigates some pictorial characteristics indicated by them  both in advertising, logos and institutional image of pharmaceutical companies, as well as in medicines.
 

“The diagnosis of a diversity of mental conditions, as well as the massive consumption of drugs is more common than is believed. Its advertising through strategies similar to those of other types of products, are characteristics of the contemporary world that attract our attention. We have found that both advertising, logos and institutional image of pharmaceutical companies, as well as medicines as such, have pictorial characteristics from their manufacture. The colors printed on the boxes and those assigned to the pills of all kinds have a logic that obeys different kinds of dynamics: sales strategy, product restrictions, brand of whoever produces it, etc.

Mental illnesses as such are not attributed a specific color.  With the purpose of translating, into a visual language, the characteristics of both the pathologies and the associated drugs, we find that when Internet searches are carried out through Google Images, before the images are fully loaded on the screen, the system performs automatically a color synthesis. In this process, some boxes appear that include the predominant color of the corresponding image and the composition depends on the size of the images that will appear on the screen. With the initial concern and the aforementioned tool, we searched for psychiatric medications of different classes, as well as the pathologies or mental situations that these medications seek to cure.

We carry this information to enamel and acrylic paintings in canvas "boxes" of different sizes, but in proportion to a cell phone screen. Acrylic paints correspond to pathologies and enamel paints, due to their industrial character, were applied to works related to drugs. When we see the result, we find that the paintings of medicines are very colorful, while those of diseases are opaque.

We chose painting as a medium, to seek a balance or counterweight between the act of painting as meditation or a state of mind, and the origin of the works (illness / advertising / medication). Behind this "screen" is what a person who has a mental illness suffers, suffers or burdens ".