The eyes! For the love of god, do not look into the eyes!
Those bizarre peepers and the similarly odd mouth all scrunched up on the face of what otherwise looks like a fairly accurate rendering of Cristiano Ronaldo’s head appear on a new bust of the man outside the Madeira airport in Portugal, the area Ronaldo is from.
The Cristiano Ronaldo Airport, to be exact. The airport held the event today to commemorate its new name, a move the local government decided after the beloved hometown hero won last summer’s Euro tournament with the Portugal national team. Ronaldo—a soccer player—now has an airport, a museum, and a hotel named in his honor back home.
No less luminary a figure than the president of Portugal himself attended the christening. If I didn’t know any better, I’d suspect that some evil Portuguese radical wielding ancient dark magic had carved the bust and imbued its terrifying visage with Medusa-like powers, knowing that Portugal’s president and its most famous celebrity would be on hand for the unveiling.
There, on the steps of this new airport, the tarp covering the devilish totem would be ripped off, and as Ronaldo’s, the president’s, and everyone else in attendance’s eyes locked with those of the bust, the entire gallery would become literally petrified where they stood. And the witch or wizard responsible would’ve made their point about decadence in modern Portugal or whatever.
Maybe that was supposed to happen, but because everyone there seemed perfectly oblivious to the fact that they were currently standing in the middle of a cursed image, the magic didn’t take. Instead, Ronaldo jovially yukked it up next to the disturbing thing while locals posed beside it:
Between this, the boner-sporting full body statue, the Ronaldo-bot in Japan, and the crotch-cake, unnerving Ronaldo art is a cottage industry.
[Guardian]
h/t David