eating the middle
Galeria Fran Reus, Mallorca · March–May 2024
Inspired by the enduring and complex desire to transcend the body, Eating the Middle explores the short circuits between speculative futures and the veiled, murky past.
The series focuses on the spaces between sentiments — intimacy and detachment, the virtual and the embodied, the natural and the synthetic. Painting becomes an ideal stage for this exploration, occupying a space between sensory object and distant image, offering an experience that is immediate, visceral and trusted, yet detached and obscured by the performative.
At the heart of Eating the Middle lies a contradiction: the obscuring language that links advancing technology with the mysterious, the occult, and the esoteric. The seemingly logical, pragmatic world of industrial science is haunted by hallucinations, ghosts, and fragments of the dark and delirious. This tension drives the work, tracing themes of metamorphosis, temptation, denial, and the allure of the artificial. Paintings draw on art historical references, transforming quotidian objects into synthetic surfaces and uncanny digital scenarios. These ideas are further amplified in the accompanying moving image work and audio installation, created in collaboration with musician and sound artist Alex Roberts.
The video complements the paintings, avoiding linear narratives in favour of looping, mutating vignettes interspersed with fragments of abstracted text. Like the paintings, the video weaves together oblique references to medieval artefacts, occult systems, cybernetics, biotechnology, data collection, and science fiction. The audio advances this atmosphere, undulating through field recordings and synthesis to create looping textures that oscillate between the blissed, the eerie, the micro, and the quotidian.
