POPAGANDA! draws upon Popart, recontextualizing vintage comic vignettes with irony.
If the series can certainly assign itself a very serious Popart lineage – it always sounds good and smart, merci Eduardo Paolozzi, Roy Lichtenstein... see Wikipedia for further name-dropping-, the artistic approach is definitely passé: a ready-made art. A non-conceptual concept, it may be defined as popartisanat or popcraftsmanship: digitally recycling vintage vignettes and their captions. Nothing fancy.
It's not about picking up a vignette and whitening the captions to sound witty: it's about making sure the pictures can be indefinitely and massively printed out on any kind of cheap or expensive material and be exhibited in underground bars, at international acclaimed lavish art galleries (hmm...), in filthy dormrooms or on condoms packaging.
Popaganda can be seen as an in-depth conceptual dissertation or as a series of smileys, art market product or fun art stuff, the project is almost still the same.
But if Popaganda is fun craft, there is some seriousness to it (God save my arty soul!): digging into hidden and implicit social propaganda - what basically comic books and pulp literature are all about. Indeed, the series aims at highlighting and reversing the social representations the original vignettes used to convey: sexism. And other bad -isms. Kind of mirroring the 50's and the 20's. Because, if the outdated and naive views offered in those old comic books make us smile, the unconscious bias underlying them are still very contemporary. Their bad -isms, for the victim or the incurious conveyor - we, the asymptomatic racists, sexists, colonialists, assholes, etc. -, do not belong to the past.
So, my arty soul is almost saved: Popaganda is about social issues! All wrapped up in pink and lavender, tasting like candy, since decrying bad -isms is sure a cool and popular mission nowadays.
A simple one and THE good one.
Maybe, sometimes a simplistic one, a kind of a social command to be obeyed so you may not be cancelled.
But pastelish vignettes would not make smart good-hearted woke people uncomfortable.
