Pillness is a triptych of paintings on canvas with mixed media techniques.

The title combines the words "pill" and "illness". It reflects a kind of "pill’s disease", the addiction to medication that can appear when their use becomes excessive. French and German people would be for instance the largest users of medication in Europe.
It also refers to the opioid crisis that began in the U.S. in the 1990s and only escalated until the mid-2010s, causing the deaths of an estimated 645,000 people. The communication (disinformation) campaign set up by the company that produced OxyContin minimized the risks of addiction among doctors and developed a very important lobbying in the pharmaceutical field in order to generate huge profits without worrying about the health dangers.
This is the other side of this "pill’s disease", a "disease of profit" that consists of establishing sales strategies at any price, even if it leads to the death of thousands of individuals.

The proliferation of the blister packages on each painting suggests this overuse by tracing some paths that take possession of the pictorial space. A cartography of silver lines emerges from the background whose dark and thick texture evokes tar and reminds us that beyond the potential pollution of the body induced by an overuse of medicines, the accumulation of packages and the numerous chemical residues in waste water produce an additional pollution of the environment, another kind of disease.

White Gesso; black Gesso; acrylic paintings (black, white, turquoise); various palette knives; a collage of aluminum blister packages; 3 cotton canvases (100x50cm x 3).

Clara Maïda, April 2023