Mimetic camouflage and the problem of pictorial representation

Abstract

A hundred years ago during the Ist World War, the first forms of military camouflage were developed. The earlier Unité de Camouflage was born in February 1915 in the French army. Mimetic camouflage design, called Disruptive Pattern Material (DPM), was the product of an intention of deceit based on concealment of equipment and facilities against the enemy. These forms of invisibility searched the mimesis or blending the environment, and they developed both abstract and figurative solutions. This paper presents the mimesis pictorial solutions produced by the military camouflage, their relationships with avantgarde painting of the moment (specially the cubist language), and paradoxes posed on the concept of imitation in the field of contemporary art and visual culture, through the destabilization of the notions of representation and naturalism. The ambiguity between the abstract and the figurative, through military camouflage, in the work of come contemporary artists (Warhol, Alighiero Boetti, Wiliam Anastasi, ecc.) will be analysed.