Dystopia
Painting installation, acrylic on canvas, LCD screens and video (2023)
“Dystopia” was born from the need to create a realistic painting away from a single figurative subject, while researching the integration of digital devices into formal painting.
The aesthetic of the central canvas was developed from textures of meat and fur generated by artificial intelligence. They were then manually altered using an image processing software to combine them with more recognizable images, such as eyes and jaws. A kind of figurative abstraction developed; we recognize the appearance of what we see, but the carnal amalgam and the distortion of the subjects prevent us from discerning its true nature.
Superimposed on the work, a video of the textures and brushstrokes modified with an illusory movement of waves and swirls, a bit like a fever dream, interspersed with the quote “NOTHING IS REAL”, as if we had lost ourselves in an alternative reality.
Around the central work unfolds a series of explorations of physical integration of miniature LCD screens and other devices directly into the paintings.
House
A house, the one I grew up in, is represented in the middle of the night. All the lights are off, except in a room upstairs where red lights flicker, that of my bedroom, in which we can sense a presence more destabilizing than reassuring.
Eye
An uncomfortable close-up of an eye contains within itself, instead of its pupil, a tiny screen which displays in a loop the flashing words “WAKE UP”, followed by the animation of concentric black and white circles, which ends with the gradual appearance of the color bands of the loss of signal of a television.
Subway
A metro station where humans are conspicuous by their absence, reads on a real LCD screen, instead of the departure time: “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” - Albert Camus
Clock
A vintage alarm clock displays a different time every second, unstable and unpredictable.
Meat
A painting depicting raw meat, echoing the central artwork, shows a binary code which can be deciphered as “IT’S ALL LIES”. From this work mysteriously emanates an audio track in which we can hear distorted samples of philosopher Alan Watts, interspersed with squeaky sounds and distortions, which mainly come from raster image files from the project which have been converted into audio files.
Modules before being integrated into the paintings. Flikering lights for the house, Arduino NANO and LCD screen for the metro station.
Themes
The project references the themes of dystopia, the end of the world, absurdity, cynicism, encryption and technology itself. It questions rather than affirms and emphasizes rather than denounces, the existence of the virtual, its distortion of the real world and its traces left on our existence.