To mark the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death, Dario Gambarin set out to honor the artist’s legacy... using a tractor. Sitting atop the machine, the Italian 'land artist' traced a reproduction of Picasso’s 1907 self-portrait into a 6 acre (2.4 hectares) field - it’s the largest portrait of Picasso ever made.
“I’m like a blind painter when I’m on the tractor; I can’t see anything,” Gambarin tells Smithsonian magazine. “I have a great sense of space and proportion. I fix the image in my head. I draw the portrait several times on the table, and then I go and execute it in the earth.”
Picasso painted at least 10 self portraits over the course of his career - his earliest in 1896, when he was just 15 years old and lived in Barcelona with his family while attending the La Llotja School of Fine Arts. His final self portraits were created in 1972, when he was in his 90s. Each work serves as a marker of his evolution as both a man and an artist.
The 1907 self portrait is considered to be among his most important, because it chronicles his transition from Primitivism to cubism, two of his most famous oeuvres, says The National.
In the 1907 portrait, produced in oil on canvas, Picasso rendered himself in angular, geometric shapes - from his almond-shaped eyes and elongated triangular nose, to the patterning on his jacket. He also employed thicker, darker outlines on his face and clothing, resulting in dramatic contrasts.
Gambarin has managed to to recreate these defining elements of the work, in spite of his unusual choice of canvas - a stretch of wasteland in Castagnaro, about an hour's drive west of Venice.
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