​_London _England _1985 September _A mysterious fire destroys a couple's home. Only a painting of a crying child was spared. The Sun newspaper reported the event. Later, a fireman reported similar events, and very soon there were numerous accounts of the harmful influence of these paintings, attributing evil powers to them. A black legend was born, conveying the idea that misfortune would befall the owners of these representations. These paintings are the work of Bruno Adamio. Marked by the Second World War, he produced this series depicting children in tears, which quickly met with great success. Reproduced and distributed on a large scale, particularly in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s, the paintings were collected together and burnt in a bonfire to ward off fate. Crying boy is the name given to this series of paintings.

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This work revisits a British urban legend from the 1980s, summoning the ghost of a popular image, suspended between collective memory and projected curse.

Charcoal, ash, and lampblack—materials born from fire—amplify the subject's symbolic weight. The portrait, hyperrealistic and spectral, seems to emerge from a cloud of soot or consumed memory. The tears are black, thick, almost physical: they speak as much of pain as of disappearance.

The tension between the technical mastery of the portrait and the liquid accident gives the work a dual interpretation: on one hand, an attempt to make visible, to remember; on the other, a sense of impediment. The portrait thus becomes a place of resistance, but also of grief.

"CRYING CHILDREN" combines fiction, historical trauma, and popular iconography. By reactivating this maligned image, the work questions the power of representations, the narratives we project onto them, and how certain images survive their own destruction.