War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength

“He wondered again for whom he was writing the diary. For the future, for the past—for an age that might be imaginary. And in front of him there lay not death but annihilation. The diary would be reduced to ashes and himself to vapour. Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?”

In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, screaming from the glittering white concrete wall of an enormous 300-meter high pyramidal structure where the Ministry of Truth was stationed, towering above the grimy landscape of the fictitious state of Oceania, were three slogans: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. As embodied by these paradoxical slogans of the totalitarian regime, the revisionist and savage nature of the purging of truth and of history alongside the purging of the people seeks to deliver the ultimate death—the obliteration from memory—and to use this as fuel for the lust for power and control.

This is the premise of the exhibition War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength where artist Julius Redillas sought among the nuances and parallels between the novel and the existing state of affairs, and translated them into objects. Accompanying watercolor works on paper are sculptures wherein religious figures were repurposed—understably secularly as stand-ins for the omnipotence of Big Brother—and covered in red paint and eyeballs. Resonant with the telescreens used for espionage and for feeding information in Big Brother’s world, threatening to vaporize any divergent guilty of even a slight gesture of unorthodoxy, these oculi present in all the shown works have the presence of floating landmines waiting to explode like divine vengeance.

The exhibition attempts to survey a political landscape of a society where the past is altered and the future blurred; where journalists are purged, dissenters redbaited then vaporized, despotism promoted for the rigodon of oligarchs; and where a superpower is kowtowed without shame. Working with a politically charged theme that howls pertinence, urgently manifesting not merely a strong political feeling but an assault to a regime, the artist has chosen to lay bare, to put it mildly, his political skin making this act of sacrilege to the status quo the real currency of the exhibition.

– R. Coronel