Condom for a Battle Tank...

Mixed media on canvas – 100 x 100 cm -Created in 2006 — long before deepfake became a household word — this dense and visionary piece by Philippe Orsero stages a saturated theatre where sex, war, and image collide.
At the center sits a battle tank, stripped of glory. It feels absurd, inert — a toy, a product.
The ironic title, condom, hints at a futile attempt to shield, disguise, or sanitize violence. Around it, red plasticized bodies seem frozen between pleasure and pain, emptied of meaning.
No longer heroes or victims, they’re props — decor for a digitized war. A main figure smiles with pixelated skin, holding a stylized breast like a trophy.  A divine hand descends — not to create, but to operate: a cold, technical gesture in place of the sacred.
This war doesn’t bleed. It sells. It is curated, aestheticized, made safe for consumption.
Flesh turns into symbol, desire into ornament, violence into visual protocol.
Orsero doesn’t accuse. He reflects.
He offers a fractured mirror in which destruction becomes a product, and intimacy becomes spectacle. Condom for a Battle Tank condenses the tension at the heart of his work: To shield the unspeakable.  To caress the machine. To turn the sign into a soft weapon.