As a teenager I used to go to the library quite a lot looking at art books;
Caravaggio I remember just sticking out. The images were so immediate, they were photographic.
There’s bits of violence in there and they were generally cropped quite close up.
You can imagine a photographer or a film-maker
holding up his hands and saying we’re going to go in that tight.
They also slightly acknowledged your presence there as you were looking at them.
There was something there that drew you in.
Those kind of images stay with you;
they're so simple and he just kind of nailed it in one.
Caravaggio’s paintings; although they’re often depictions of quite real looking people,
they’re imbued with something which is almost supernatural;
the way the light comes down and the composition, and the action that he’s depicting.
And it’s kind of like you’re looking through a keyhole into the scene,
or you’ve opened a crack in a door and that light’s falling across this little vignette.
But the drama that’s being played out is morally ambiguous,
so you’re not sure what your relationship to it is,
and you’re seeing something that’s almost forbidden in a way.
Are you sympathising with what’s happening with the victim in the scene
or are you actually enjoying this scenario being played out in front of you?
And it was that kind of moral ambiguity that I wanted to include in the work that I was making.
I made this work about the 'Massacre of the Innocents',
which is a large temple and inside are hundreds of different figures,
and initially your response to it is to be quite entertained.
Then after a few seconds of looking at it you work out it’s a scene of a massacre
and it’s something that is morally abhorrent. So that dichotomy between the two emotions
that you’re feeling is something that I think I’ve taken from his paintings.
When you’re looking at these paintings of
Caravaggio you feel like you’re communing with something from the past,
they have that presence to them. So I wanted to make works which dealt with
the status of the image that he was conjuring up with his models in the studio.
I took three paintings from Galleria Borghese and I modelled them on a computer,
and then I simulated candlelight or daylight streaming through a little window.
So you have this very tentative, flickering play of light over these twitching, trembling bodies.
They’re like the phantasm of the human spirit,
which has become something else in the moment that he captures them.
Caravaggio’s paintings are still interesting to audiences today because they are seductive to look at
There’s violence in there, there’s moral ambiguity, there's emotional tension in there.
And they’re also painted very beautifully and they kind of look like photographs;
and all those things together is a very powerful package.