Artists: June Crespo, (agf) HYDRA, Katja Novitskova, Kyvèli Zoi

Ambroise Paré, born in France around 1510, was chief surgeon to both Charles IX and Henri III. In one of the first attempts to explain bodily defects, he produced On Monsters and Marvels, an illustrated encyclopedia of curiosities, of monstrous human and animal births, bizarre beasts, and natural phenomena. The existence of these creatures is explained by Paré as possibly caused by the glory of God or his wrath, by too great a quantity of seed or lack of it, by the pregnant mother having remained seated too long or having had her legs crossed.

Hydropic Figures presents artworks whose shapes can be traced back to the body, although they construct forms that allude to other forms as well: the object/body is cut and reconfigured into details and partial views, commenting on the actual and symbolical dynamics enveloping it. The invited artists conduct an analysis of contemporary models of perception and representation, tackling their complexities —and eventual failures— in the hyper-stylized and hyper-perfect dominant visual
culture.

June Crespo has developed a sculptural language based upon techniques like collage and assembly, as well as the experimental use of the image. Her process begins with the recording of different flowers via photogrammetry, which are then 3D­-printed; then altered via different scale-­changing operations, as well as perforation, fragmentation and combination; then transformed using moulds, in a whole new and personal grammar of repetitions and variations. Shapes are crystallized in an
interdependent relationship with the wall of the exhibition space, violently and elegantly protruding from it, evoking its simultaneous nature of support and constriction. This process suggests the becoming of a form that is pushed out from the inside, one that is rigid and fluid at the same time, like the body.

A series of translucent archetypes define the aesthetics of the HYDRA project: the body of work provides ritualistic tools of non-verbal communication integrating somatic acts of transpersonal intimacy with nurturing and accessible technology for the elaboration of personal and systematic trauma, addressing and challenging the current experience around addiction and compulsion, consumption and desire. «HYDRA BREATHING ORCHID - A CERVIX A THROAT» is a liquid membrane sculpture,
that functions as an organic interface connecting the separate elements of the collective body via breathing and touch. Breathing spasms of meditative pleasure.

The surrender to artificial intelligence is found at the core of Katja Novitskova’s creative process. Part of a series titled Soft Approximations, a sculpture is rendered using the Midjourney algorithm blending two images, documentation photos of older works, bringing light to how the mutation and cross-breeding the artist has once authored generates potential new forms that she herself could have never imagined. A second sculpture is created using DALL-E, elaborating on one scientific image that tried to approximate how a dolphin would identify a human being using echolocation: a non-human AI algorithm approximating how a non-animal dolphin would see a person.

A dialogue between nature and the human is created through the portrayal of visionary landscapes within female figures in the series Magna Mater by Kyvèli Zoi. Using the symbol of a woman’s torso as a vessel that holds nature within, these pictorial compositions serve as both an embodiment of our sensation of complete dependence on nature as a species and a reflection on environmental issues, bringing forward a commentary on the relationship and antithesis of the viewer and the viewed, the spectator and the spectacle, through the philosophical and romanticized viewpoint of the artist’s surrealistic and personal take on her physical presence as a woman in the contemporary world.

These creatures are in between species, they are interacting in ways we cannot fully comprehend.
Yet.
Or, will we ever?

In an approach to the corporeal where algorithms and artificial intelligences are on the same level of nature, the alien and the non-human depicted by science fiction are not to be retrieved in a hypothetic distant futures, but in the monsters and marvels that the human body can shape itself into.