Ramon Espantaleon: The Temptation

From his series, First Apple, Espantaleón uses a 3-D resin model of Manhattan as his canvas. By painting the tops of each building in the model, he achieves a pointillist effect. In The Temptation, Espantaleón uses this technique to represent a panel from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. By portraying Adam and Eve’s acceptance of the forbidden fruit and expulsion from Eden over a rendering of the Big Apple, Espantaleón playfully explores ideas about the origins of the world.

This series expresses the artist’s ideas about the origin of the world. To achieve this, the artist used the technique of pointillism, reinterpreted and applied over the volumetric representation of the island of Manhattan, considered by many the center of the modern world. Manhattan is also known as the Big Apple, fruit of discord associated with the creation of mankind through Adam and Eve. Therefore, the artist chose to represent Michelangelo’s “Temptation and Expulsion”, one of his most famous panels from the Sistine chapel ceiling, and painted it over Manhattan, a vigorous, dynamic, powerful, changing and chaotic city, a modern paradise.