Chrysalide du Machaon, 2025

Romain Liverato  

Photograph printed on fine art paper enhanced with gold leaf, including a wooden frame with museum-quality glass - Unique piece - - Private Collection in France

Icons

Working with the “Icons" series allows me to transpose the codes of Byzantine art to the representation of landscape and living things, elevating Nature to the status of a sacred subject.
In each work, I incorporate a gold background, traditionally a symbol of divine light, which surrounds natural fragments, animals, and horizons with a halo. Here, gold no longer refers to the religious divine, but to a universal, contemporary sacredness, whose sole subject is living beings.
In the Byzantine tradition, the gold background erases all spatial or temporal references, giving the subject a timeless and sacred dimension. I use this process as a tool for a symbolic reinterpretation of the natural world. Celestial light now surrounds every element of life, offering it constancy, dignity, and solemnity.
I revalue what we too often relegate to the background as a simple blade of grass, a piece of bark, or a distant horizon. Here, every fragment of landscape becomes an object of contemplation. Each work affirms that Nature, as a whole and in its most modest details, deserves sacred recognition.
Linked to history, I have adopted small formats (5.2×5.2 inches or 3.9×1.1 inches without frame) reminiscent of the portable icons that travelers once carried with them on their journeys. These intimate works invite a personal, almost devotional relationship with Nature.
Presented as a whole, the series forms a polyptych, an installation inspired by the Byzantine iconostasis, the wall of “icons" placed between the faithful and the altar. This ensemble creates a fruitful tension between the intimate and the monumental, between the detail and the whole, between the spiritual and the organic.
It is interesting to note that “Icons" is a continuation of my “Sanctified" series. In it, I revisit certain symbols from ancient religious art, such as the halo and the gold background, not as stylistic references, but as plastic and conceptual tools to question the value of the living world and the relationship we have with it.