It began, as most things do, with imitation. A reference to Dali Atomicus, that pre-digital attempt at photographic hysteria. But Charlotte de Cock didn’t just restage the scene. She dismembered it midair. She threw chickens. She threw herself. And once the photo was developed—once the evidence was frozen—she attacked it again. With paint.
This is not a photograph. It’s a two-phase performance. First the image, then the defacement. Red and blue ecoline violence layered over calculated suspension. The gesture says: This never belonged to the camera anyway.
Blue washes over the scene like regret. Either way, the act is the same: don’t let the photo speak for itself. Drown it. Complicate it. Mute the narrative by oversaturating it.
The chickens remain indifferent. A large painting of Floyd, is part of the composition. Floyd is both muse and mirror. Or maybe just a placeholder for things she cannot name.
Either way, it’s there—watching her float.
De Cock herself is mid-leap, frozen in a pose that means nothing outside the camera’s logic. She isn’t flying. She’s posing as if she might be. But the chair, the splash, the deadpan silkie on the right—they all know better. Suspension is temporary. Myth is post-production.
The most telling detail is what happens after. She prints the photographs. Then returns to them as if they had misbehaved. She paints over the proof. Not to beautify it, but to question its authority. Paint as a refusal to let the image be the final word. Call it auto-vandalism if you want. The gesture is Freudian: repetition compulsion disguised as composition.
Dali’s atomic explosion becomes a post-mortem autopsy. A chicken is mid-flight but already historical. A chair hovers, amputated from its function. The artist floats—once for the camera, twice for herself, always for us.
In the end, Cockus Atomicus doesn’t celebrate weightlessness. It audits it. The photograph is just a receipt. The real transaction happens in the overlay—in the acrylic wounds and chromatic sabotage. This isn’t surrealism. It’s forensic surrealism. Not what does it mean? but what was done to it?
Cockus Atomicus
Size 102 x 80 CM and Unique
The work comes with a certicicate authored by the artist and will be shipped from the artist's studio