The Gospel of Crowd:Pontius Pilatus

The Gospel of a Crowd:Judgement Day, Olga Glumcher, 300x150cm, oil/canvas, 2016. Exclusively for WerderArt

THE GOSPEL OF A CROWD

The project is a series of paintings exploring the interaction between a person and a mob. The relationship of an individual and a state, the priorities and the search of a balance in the relationship.

‘An individual is ought to be trusted’ said Pericles. The Greeks put ‘man is the measure of all things’ in the foundation of the Western civilisation.

In Warring States period China, Taoist hermits retreated into caves and the space around them spontaneously came into harmony, and the life of the nearest villages improved. Late however, the Grand Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered to bury the monks alive. Nobody knows the names of the sculptors that created his terracotta army, nor the the millions of the Chinese names of the Great Wall builders. Because, as a great general from another Great Empire said once ‘women will just bear more’.

Some say it is the First Emperor of China who’s invented the bureaucracy, to make anybody enquiring from the government to feel themselves feeble and insignificant before the might of the state.

With that corruption has appeared too. “Governing a nation is like cooking a small fish” — this ancient Chinese saying came long before the modern householders were named ‘plankton’.

The Mongols had appropriated that Chinese model and spread it to the area where later Soviet Union has extended and evolved the system.

The Western model, based on humanistic ideals of Antiquity may have flaws, but it values each human life and respects each human’s free will, provided that will does not harm the other.

Free will is the only possession of a person, and a respectable robber never takes the last thing you have.

The diptychs have titles and plots from the Bible, because they are rather archetypes, not tied to a specific time or country. As long as humanity has existed, there have been wars, refugees, the courage of revolutions, the cowardice of politicians and the betrayal of those who trusted. And cats