The transfer-prints from the Caffè Rosso at the Piazza Santa Margarita in Venice, Italy, were taken in spring 2009. Many things happened since then until the idea took shape to use it for the practical problematization of the occidental conventions of representing saints. According to the tradition, art seems to be instrumentalized for restoring the saints’ personal rights through a figurative representation. The painting depicts elements of the myth of Margaret of Antiochia (a red dragon and a phallic grapheme) in the form of a disembodied allegory of the legend of the saint. It is part of a group of works questioning the representation of sacrality under the limiting condition of profane contemporaneity. Other works of this group are Fatima (2010), Sepulchre (2014), and The Altarpiece (2015).
Each marks or treats a problem that T. W. Adorno described in 1957 as a process in which nothing theological would remain unchanged if it wouldn’t be able to migrate into the sphere of the secular and profane.
Margaret lived at the end of the third and beginning of the fourth century A.D. She is referred to as Margaret the Virgin in the Western church and as Marina the Martyr in the Orthodox church (East). She was allegedly the daughter of a pagan priest in Antioch but nursed by a Christian woman. She embraced Christianity herself and was disowned by her father. Later, the Roman governor Olybrius asked to marry her and wanted her to renounce Christianity. Upon her refusal, she was tortured. According to the legend, she was swallowed by Satan in the shape of a dragon from which she escaped alive due to the cross she carried that irritated the dragon.
