Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein is one of the most cultured and interesting interpreters of Pop Art. In his works, unmistakable in style and subject, Lichtenstein plays with tradition, paying homage to the great masters of the 20thcentury, assaulting the eye with the new languages of mass culture, experimenting with new techniques in both painting and sculpture. In his most famous works, Lichtenstein steals the imagery of comic strips, imagining situations that seem to beextracted from a larger story. By decontextualizing themin this way, these narrative excerpts take on a new value, disorienting the viewer who is no longer able to reconstruct the meaning. To create the illusion of an enlarged comic book panel, Lichtenstein borrowed the Ben-Day printing technique, a system of identically sized dots of different colours that give the image a grainy aspect. The colours are applied uniformly and flat, completely free of shading. To obtain this chromatic result, he used the latest generation acrylic paints. Very attentive to the quality of the colour, Lichtenstein commissioned a well- known American manufacturer to produce a customised line of paints for him, designed to achieve the desired effects and offer a sufficiently wide range of shades.