In seven staged self-portraits, the artist embodies the classical deadly sins Like pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust, linking each of these moral states to a clichéd national stereotype. What may initially appear as an ironic role play reveals itself, upon closer inspection, to be a precise and socially critical intervention that navigates the tensions between stereotyping, collective guilt, and cultural self-performance.
As an artist collective concerned with urban symbolism, political aesthetics, and materialized critique, we perceive this work as a radical act of self-transformation. Krome enters the frame as both subject and object: she is model, actress, critic, and allegory all at once. By placing herself at the center of the staging, she also confronts us as viewers, challenging our gaze, our projections, and our internalized biases.
Each image is meticulously composed with color, lighting, posture, and props follow a visual logic that draws from both classical iconography and pop cultural references.
The German sin of envy is shown through rigid order, cold control, and the aesthetics of bureaucratic dominance. American gluttony manifests as inflated masculine bravado, a world of beach boys, Miami Vice, power posturing, and entertainment spectacle. British lust becomes a decadent retreat into awkwardly salacious storytelling. None of these portrayals remain at surface level, they function simultaneously as caricature and critical mirror. Eccetera.
What fascinates us most is Krome’s approach to cultural representation. The Sadly Sins does not merely illustrate how stereotypes operate, it shows how they are staged, believed in, consumed, and perpetuated across generations. Krome employs the visual language of photography to question the language of the nation. In an era where identity is repeatedly narrowed and instrumentalized, she opens a performative space of confrontation.
For us at F-A-C Fronte Acciaio Cromato, this series is not just an artistic work but a visual theory. It operates at the intersection of individual performance and collective reception, between myth and deconstruction, between desire and violence. Through its ironic seriousness and its formal stubbornness, it speaks a language that resonates deeply with us, a language of contradiction, of friction, and of form.
The Sadly Sins is not a comfortable commentary, it is a performative invitation to confront the world through one’s own cultural lens. To us, it is a bold statement of artistic relevance. And a spark of truth, too.
F-A-C – Fronte Acciaio Cromato 2015
