Aaron Ford
Via Appia Through Glass
2024
Oil on canvas
150 x 130 cm
All That You Believe is Here and Now
2024
Oil on glass
60 x 43 cm
The paintings presented by Aaron Ford, Sainsbury Scholar at the BSR 2023/24, mark the conclusion of a cycle of visual exploration and research undertaken during the artist's six months residency in Rome. Ford was attracted to the motif of a vague, undefined black male figure, his arm outstretched in the air, posing between rest and action. The image itself arose from an observation made among the statues in the Foro Italico sports complex, with one statue representing a strange anomaly within the fascist paradigms of male health and beauty, a figure apparently wearing dreadlocks. Ford used this symbol, painting it on glass, in parallel with the research he undertook on the presence of the figure of Hannibal in Rome, discovering a lack of evidence of the presence of the city's most famous enemy. The Carthaginian embodies multiple narratives lost in the colonial past, whose ghosts make their way into contemporary iconography. These transparent images are then taken along the Via Appia, confronted with the landscape, and painted over again. In this way we recognise the superimposition of the past on the present and a present haunted by the past.
