In this, the apogee of the Metaverse, a space in which protagonists can evolve within an entirely virtual “other world”, it struck me as pertinent to show, uncritically, that painting has already offered since time immemorial a space outside of the world that is complex, unregulated, and autonomous, with its own symbols.
While the beta version of a software program is a kind of infinite prototype, the one that comes prior to the finite and perfect meta version, then painting could be considered a meta version of the world – the place where intuitions are engaged, desires in their raw state, a surface full of bugs like an ode to doubts, possibilities, and dreams.
To echo this statement, I painted anarchical habitats: huts that are places that have truly existed. The inhabitants of these singular constructions dream of autonomy, of a world beyond the world. Through their approach, they replay the duality of map versus territory. The living world is mapped out and yet the actual territory is always full of “hideouts”.
This exhibition is intended as an ode to the real world, just as painting is an ode to the physicality of dreams. Several years ago, I wrote that one cm2 of rug aged by time will always be more complex and interesting than 1 000 m2 of pixels. Within reality, there are unfathomable abysses[n1] . At the end of the film Don’t Look Up, before being crushed by a meteorite, one of the protagonists said: “We actually have all we need to be happy.” I think that against the possibility of an expansive and virtual Meta world, we must oppose a poetic and utopian “already here” reality.
This exhibition will therefore present three works entitled the whole universe. It is these canvases that will reuse the title and typography of the famous encyclopaedia that reigned supreme in homes, in all of its bulk, prior to the emergence of the internet. A kind of pre-internet internet; in short, an illustrated attempt to embrace all of the knowledge of humanity on one sturdy shelf. I have a very strong memory of it, personally, having spent years copying the often outmoded [n2] images that illustrate the various volumes.
I have the intimate sense that it is always important to thank or pay tribute to a disappearing world. With these red whole universe canvases (which are in fact vanitas) and the paintings of huts (the result of the dream of autonomy by a few), I’m trying to pay tribute to the real, to let it know that it will always be our world, no matter what we’re told.
Welcome to the Betaverse, you will find the whole universe in it, in what it contains in itself: simple, complex, and finite, like a painting.
