Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

by Marcelo Terashima

The current feeling around the world, or perhaps inside folk’s minds, is that mankind is in the blink of extinction. In this context, on the one hand, it’s natural to think that the four horsemen of Apocalypse are on our doorstep, spreading decay and misery around the globe. Famine, pestilence, war and death are upon us, and they were just a footnote on developed countries’ newspapers if not for the COVID, that has affected the world entirely and without discretion. Now the risk is overwhelming, as stress and anxiety are too. On the other hand, some affirm that the world is in fact improving. Extreme poverty has fallen around the world, and hunger has as well. Child labour is on the decline and child mortality has fallen by more than half since 1990. Everywhere, life expectancy is rising, and people in developed countries have more leisure time. The supply of nuclear weapons has rapidly reduced, and more people live in a democracy now. More people are going to school for longer and literacy is going up. Solar energy is getting cheaper and access to the internet is increasing. Despite the predictions of the alarmists, humanity is striving and evolving. As an artist, I am inspired by the human form and by artists who painted it using a naturalistic approach. However, for this artwork, I choose a more conceptual approach. The use of the canvas board was intentional because it allowed me to physically sculpt the canvas, like disasters that are represented by each of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. On the map, the lines are the marks of each knight. They connect the ten hungriest countries in the world and the ten most unhealthy countries. By deaths, ten countries with the most deaths per million from COVID since the beginning of the pandemic. And finally, for war, ten of the most censored countries which controlled their citizens’ information. War in the digital and analog post-truth era, when information became the most important asset on the planet. Independently where your beliefs lie on, the fact is that famine, pestilence, war and death are among us. As they always have been. One point is certain, and it is that some countries are more fortunate than others. In this art piece, the globe is depicted as a whole, without the common geographical divisions, in a naive utopia. On the globe, we can see the hands of the horsemen, scratching, digging, carving the planet as hunger ghosts. The result of their work is open wounds, or paraphrasing the title of Eduardo Galeano’s book, they are open veins in the world.

Acrylics on Canvas Board  - 2021

30.5 x 40.6 cm