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Prize the Beauty of Justice Above All Else,
2023 from
4 Tenets for Europe,
Aix-en-Provence France, 15 September 2023.
2023
Billboards and posters, digital and paper
1 of
4 Tenets for Europe
Moving image: 192 x 288px, 704 x 960px mp4 video, RGB colour, duration 0:10; 1080 x 1920px mp4 video, RGB colour, duration 0:05 and 0:10; 1920 x 1080 mp4 video, RGB colour, duration 0:30
Static digital: 720 x 1056px, 864 x 432px, 1080 x 1920px, 1600 x 400px jpeg, RGB colour.
Paper: 1350 x 2980mm, 1375 x 2905mm CMYK colour
15 September 2023
Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, UK
The idea that justice itself is beautiful emerged in an interview for a Sky Arts documentary about Firrell’s life and work (
Overthrow the Social Order;
Hyde Hill Productions; director Oliver Guy Watkins, 2018).
In the course of the interview, Firrell was asked why his artworks weren’t ‘more beautiful’.
Firrell replied, ‘What could be more beautiful than to try to say something about the world being more just or fairer? I can’t think of anything more exquisitely wondrous - the immense and vast beauty of justice - it’s better than all the coloured paint in the world, isn’t it?’
There is an affecting irony in the artist's use of gestrual brush stokes of 'coloured paint' to illustrate the
4 Tenets for Europe
. It is as if Firrell pits the visual effect of painterly 'coloured paint' against the text's assertion of the primacy of justice as the greatest source of beauty.
