O2
O2 is the needed formula, the base of life. Almost as if the O symbolised our planet and 2 multiplies the possibilities of life.The life we face and the life we idealize and desire, both affected by the consequences of our ubris, but still needy of a en on and cure.
How to face progress when it creates destruction?The consequences of the idealisation of progress proclaimed during the 18th century, today controlled by a Foucauldian logic of power, become today our closest enemies and are transforming the Utopic dream into a global illusion The paradise on earth, the Garden of Eden, will survive to the movement of cyclical destruction or we will have to face the realisation of Francis Bacon’s prophecy in New Atlantis, in which humans will become victims of their desire knowledge by violating the secrets of Nature?
Art is there to trigger your emotions, to disturb you, to oblige you. More than 4.5 million children in the UK are growing up in areas with toxic levels of air pollution, the UN children’s organisation Unicef has warned.
The elements inside the cage are PM10 (particles) PM2.5 (particles), NO2 (Nitrogen Dioxide), CO (Carbon Monoxide), SO2 (Sulphur Dioxide) and O3 (Ozone).
The acceleration of progress created a distance between nature and human beings, but in our deep memories, behind this process hyper-normalization, the relation to nature remain a fundamental element of our collective subconscious, in our liquid modernity, in which the lost paradise still survives. The statistics on the health of the world reveal an irreversible state of urgency, in which there is no more space to hide. U-topos, no-where: is the place in which we imagine to contemplate our lost paradise, referring to the island of Thomas Moore, Utopia.
O2 imagined by Cyril de Commarque has the function of expressing the contrasting feeling of lost, giving a shape to the human inner desire of preserving a lost paradise into our fragile reality: a massive metal cage, a structure which is apparently - architectonically - strong, but at the same me it is fragile and unreachable, conceptually too far even if physically so close, aiming to create in the spectator a sense of disorientation and masochistic tension in front of the object.
O2 was exposed in ARTIFICIALIS solo show, at Saatchi Gallery, London 2019.
