Pairi-daêza ~ A world of Paradise(s)

The figure of a floating jellyfish is hovering above the sea turning onto itself and seems unmoved by the waves dying on the shore. Its texture is vibrant, shiny and opaque. Its plasticity is hypnotic though uncanny and aided by the dramatic effect of the accompanying music, we are slowly drowned to the realisation that this alien doesn't belong here. Its bloated body reminds us of floating plastic bags, and its dangling tentacles are ready to strangle. Exalting death won’t be sufficient to preserve the beauty of the world.

In this work, the symbols of still life painting are used in a fashionable manner. A pear for abundance, an orange for prosperity, mint leaves as aphrodisiac and a snake to represent fertility and immortality. This colourful elixir seems to hold all the promise of life and more. But this ancestral human centric obsession has led us to commit monstrous crimes and with them, the promise of youth remains out of reach, kept away in the fragility of the glass bottle.

The figure of the shepherd is one that leads, takes care, and gathers. Filled with nature and the cosmos, they stand in symbiosis, they are symbiosis, the Arcadie in which all elements gather and thrive, where the balance is respected and life flourishes. This more than human figure, like trees, become the lung and the guardian of fragile ecosystems.

Growing from the top of a head of hair, a lettuce emerges as the tip of the iceberg. Its roots are grounded to the brain below forming a network of mycelium and brain cells. The decisions we make, our moods, our relationship to other humans and more than humans and our environment are all fuelled by the food we consume. This playful composition is a reminder of this and an invitation to think about how food can become thoughts and thoughts become food.

‘Plasmocyte Rosé is globular translucid anamorphic element. Rendered from a synthetic void, its arbitrary nature is revealed as digital phosphene. Its growth or decay is sustained through stacks of control voltage pulsation emitted by modular synthesizers.’ S.Pitt.

This nebula is an embryo waiting to be born. What life awaits us? in the metaverse. What form of ecosystem can we hope to find? Is this the beginning or is this the end of something much bigger?

The artist describes this as ‘a multiverse composed of an undefinable number of increasingly divergent, non-communicating parallel universes or quantum worlds.’ The promises have gone. Seemingly in the metaverse, worlds don’t connect, ecosystems can’t converse. We are trapped in an infernal loop, a psychedelic void with no escape. How can we find doors in between worlds, connectors that ground us back to reality?

The symmetry of the room and its decorative elements, the central figure of the fountain and the hyper augmented texture of the water jet signify we have arrived in a digital Hortus Conclusus. A meta paradise in which we organise and make sense of the world as an object of contemplation. Its beauty is hypnotic, soothing, calming and we want to sit with it and enter its physicality. Yet we are presented with a facade, an interface that loops back onto itself. The calmness fades quickly leaving us only with the replay to sustain this digital trompe l’oeil.