Original artwork description:

Masculinity in existential crisis. That’s the unspoken center of Jerome Cholet’s haunting collage “Achilles Silver.” At just 40x40 cm, this mixed-media work—composed of photographic fragments, silver spray paint, and a glassy layer of epoxy resin—packs an emotional weight that belies its size.

Based on a photograph of Ernst Herter’s 1884 sculpture of the dying Achilles, found in Empress Sisi’s palatial Achilleion on Corfu, Cholet dissects the mythic figure like a forensic surgeon. The classical beauty is no longer idealized but shattered, sliced, and reassembled into something wounded and intimate.

With influences echoing John Stezaker’s poetic disruptions, Antony Gormley’s anatomical deconstructions, and a restrained, melancholic nod to David LaChapelle’s glamorized agony, Achilles Silver speaks fluently in the visual dialect of contemporary trauma. Yet it goes further: the silver gleam, often a symbol of prestige and legacy, here feels tarnished, like war medals worn by a forgotten soldier. The epoxy resin’s gloss isn’t celebratory—it’s a shell, a synthetic skin covering emotional fracture.

This is not just an image; it’s an artifact of collapse, a psychological excavation of manhood’s classical image in today’s fractured reality. For collectors who seek conceptual rigor with visceral appeal, this piece is both timely and timeless—a relic from a broken myth, mirrored in our moment.

Materials used:

Photo, Paper, Spray Paint, Epoxy resin

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