Anyone that is familiar with Damien Hirst's work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is bound to crack a smile when they see the work of Spanish artist, Alfonso Batalla.
In Batalla's own work, A Dolphin for Damien, he mimics Hirst's famous work of a shark in a tank of formaldehyde, only with a Jeff-Coons-style inflatable dolphin, in a similarly light and desolate tank environment.
While we might get a tingle of humour from the piece, the artist did not necessarily intend for the work to be humorous. The artwork is part of a larger series entitled Landscape Under Construction, where the artist fills empty and abandoned spaces, with bright and recognisable objects from everyday life. The resulting photographs os the scenes exhibit a sense of familiarity in a location of isolated neglect.
The artist was quoted on
Design Boom, describing the philosophy of the work; "the dolphin is just one of the many actors of my 'landscape under construction' series. in this work a new, ordinary,
shiny element many times related to our childhood is digitally inserted in a powerful decaying architectural environment.
this has something to do with hegel/heideger philosophical concepts. in a simple explication we, human beings,
live usually in a 'being there' status. we are happy, or sad, with our jobs, properties, family...from time to time we feel a kind of distress,
anguish, and we start to realize what we are. we might call this condition 'being oneself."