Trick Question
alongside paintings by Alexandre Pepin at Chilli Gallery, 2025
alongside paintings by Alexandre Pepin at Chilli Gallery, 2025
Is it a flower? a bomb? a tree? a machine?
These are trick questions because the works are of course drawings and sometimes objects. The real questions behind these trick questions are: What does it stand for? Why was it made? and Is this allowed?
To be fair, I have in fact drawn (inspiration from) flowers, bombs, trees, and machines, alongside war maps, weather maps, informational leaflets, and postwar abstraction. But the drawings do not represent, one-to-one, what they reference. My interest is in whether the formal similarities between such disparate things and their associated symbolisms suggest some sort of underlying conceptual alignment. Blooming outward and upward, sharp and roiling, the form in question constitutes an expansion that is both vital (like a flower in the cement that strives towards the sun) and cruel (like imperial ambitions which kill in the name of growth).
The real real question is: where do we go in a world whose metaphors fumble, slip, and falter, converge and diverge, forget, forge aimless paths, double back, overlap, reject history only to stumble back into it…?
2025