José Rodeiro Chernobyl, Mon Amour, oil-on-linen 52’’ x 38,’’ 1986.
Rodeiro was in Barcelona in April, 1986, when the core of Chernobyl’s Nuclear Power Plant (in Pripyat, Ukraine) exploded, emitting a vast radioactive cloud that spread throughout the world. The painting depicts an underground bunker in Africa, during the 21st Century. Cancer and illness effect the bunker’s underground survivors, who existentially continue living as though nothing was awry, although the visible effects of radioactive-toxicity are evident. Rodeiro’s Chernobyl, Mon Amour is based on Marguerite Duras’s novel Hiroshima Mon Amour, which the French film director Alain Resnais turned into a film in 1959.