CHIMERAS | vice

The series consists of acrylic paintings on canvas in various formats, exploring the interconnectedness of the human body and its environment. I seek to challenge the assumption that the human body can be clearly separated from the rest of the living world, with particular attention to the vegetal realm, pushing this idea towards a form of visual hyperbole. Here, humans and plants are not treated as separate categories linked through symbolic analogy; instead, they become materially, visually, and ontologically entangled.

Chimerical fusion is the fundamental principle underlying the series. The body is not depicted as a plant taking on a human form; rather, an entirely new hybrid body emerges, whose anatomy can no longer be divided into “human” and “plant” components. It is precisely this impossibility of separation that becomes one of the central sites of meaning within the project.

Throughout the history of art, representations of the human body have been closely tied to questions of knowledge. Anatomy is not simply a way of depicting what lies beneath the skin; it is a cultural tool through which we seek to understand our own material nature.

From Renaissance anatomical studies and the medical atlases and botanical herbariums of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to contemporary visualisations of biology, scientific illustration has never been merely a neutral means of transmitting facts. It is also a way of classifying, organising, and ultimately making sense of the world. It is precisely at this intersection of the scientific gaze and imagination that I situate my current body of work, Chimerical Studies.