Sirio Berati is an Albanian visual artist. His work is primarily focused on photography, especially digital art. His pieces aim to study the idea of identity, culture and class, intertwined with a philosophical approach. Bellow is one of his digital works called “Beyond blue and evil”.
Sirio says: “I have always been fascinated by philosophy and its conception of morality, especially when it comes to good and evil. Therefore, as a digital artist, I embodied its concept into a photoshop creation. Evil is on the left while heavenly good on the right. The everlasting conflict of this dichotomy coming to peace in order to attain the pinnacle of well being. Below, I’m explaining my workflow. As a visual artist, I aim to study the idea of identity, culture and class, intertwined with a philosophical approach to it. This time, I wanted to focus on morality, the intrinsic good and the intrinsic bad (or evil).”
The whole idea behind this concept comes from the same book written by Friedrich Nietzsche. People have been judging morality by good and evil. They think that evil is the opposite good. I believe that it’s not so simple saying so. The terminology of good and evil as implied by title, are things that we should be getting past.
He goes on and explains the developing process of the final image through photoshop:
Before and after pictures
As you can realise, the edited image has colder tones than the original one, giving it a more dramatic and dynamic feel, associating it with fear. Blue represents sky and heaven, while red, fire and hell.
In order to achieve this retro/disco feeling I decided to color the the opposing sides with opposing colors, such as pink and blue, to give it a more cinematic look. As well, I retouched the skin and its imperfections to make it look smooth and add into the image.
To make the image more interesting and give it a surreal approach, I decided to add some MAGIC to it. I added a butterfly on the shoulder of the “Evil”, symbolising the good within, and decided to color the cross a vivid red reflecting on the “GOOD”’s face, again, symbolising the evil within.
I added some red flames on the left to make it feel more dramatic and relatable, while some butterflies on the right.
Hell (the evil) is often associated with flames, therefore I did add some fire ashes.
The final product.
Follow Sirio’s work on instagram: instagram.com/sirio
