Blown off – and not just the bloody doors. Exposed by explosions,
the inside of a block of flats revealed like the set for West Side Story. Look at those balconies, crudely constructed out
of iron bars: modernist Mondrian meets original Broadway set designer Oliver
Smith – fantastic!
Beneath the flats, Breugel-people sift through white debris
in search of survivors; asking themselves, ‘how can dust be so heavy?’ Milling
around they merge into one: crowd, community, peasantry.
The whole scene is glazed with light. Did the bombs rain
down at dawn? Exposed interiors brightened from Pantone PMS 7502 to PMS 7500
(beige to cream); suffused in the same way as Tintoretto, Canaletto, Fra
Angelico.
This is Aleppo, rebel-held Syrian city in the aftermath of
air raids, as photographed in this morning’s newspaper. The tint in the scene comes
from the block of red (Pantone PMS 185) in the Vodafone advertisement on the
other side of the same sheet of paper.
By dint of this, I stop to see these people and their torn
city instead of turning over the page.
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