11.03.-27.04.2023
"Paradise Hypothesis"
Galerie Priska Pasquer, Paris, France

PRISKA PASQUER PARIS is pleased to present “Paradise Hypothesis”, the second solo exhibition by the Ukrainian artist Olexiy Potupin (known as Aljoscha), and his first ever solo exhibition in France. After studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where he now lives and works, he created a new genre, “Bioism”, that has taken the world by storm: Getty Center in Los Angeles, La Fondazione Sant’Elia in Palermo, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki. His fantastic works in the fields of painting, installations and sculpture bring utopias to life through the biofuturistic unknown. Anchored in the here and now, they guide visitors from the present into the future – always full of hope and in search of “bonum humanum” (Thomas Aquinas), the good within people.

This search is the artist’s political mission; for him, art and activism go hand in hand: documenting his pacifist interventions with a camera, he strives to create an awareness of the uniqueness of each and every living being and to engender respect for the others. He recently took his delicate sculptures on tour to Ukraine shortly before the Russian invasion. The Mother Homeland statue in Kiev was built to commemorate the Soviet victory in the Second World War, and he stood opposed to it with his naked and defenceless body. Crossing his arms and raising them skyward, he confronted the statue’s bellicose pose with two pink acrylic creations. The photo documenting his protest was carried throughout the global press.

Paradise Hypothesis

In “Paradise Hypothesis”, living beings populate an entirely new form of gallery. The delicate objects, sculptures and landscape pictures have a strangely weightless quality and an air of nobility. Aljoscha places these in a paradisical yet fundamentally indefinable state that he endeavours to explore. Driven by the question as to how we view our biological future, he integrates philosophical, bioethical and scientific questions into his artistic contemplations. This served as the basis for his development of an anticipatory evolutionary theory: bioism. It can be understood as the manifesto under which Aljoscha subsumes all of his artistic work.

Utopian beings

His roots lie in painting, and oil paintings and delicate drawings are the starting point of his working process. Using these as a beginning, Aljoscha transfers the image concept into space and develops sculpture that in some respects appears to grow mesh-like from the image, an installation meandering through the room or transforming into a living embodiment of a sculptural presence. The use of the materials acrylic, silicone and aluminium makes the artificial nature of these objects clear to see, even as their lightness is suggestive of a natural mobility.

The “p-landscapes” and drawings showcase organic shapes whose origins lie in the inspiration the artist has drawn from synthetic biology. Starting from the centre of each image, organisms appear to be growing and metamorphosing outwards in all directions, creating an impression of three-dimensional depth. Even so, the frequently monochrome, contourless backgrounds allow the formations to float in an infinite and weightless sphere. Aljoscha describes his works as living embodiments of utopias. The first such fantastical future, the island of “Utopia”, was developed by the English scholar Thomas More some 500 years ago as a remedy for an exhausted society. He, too, located his vision far away from reality, in the middle of the global ocean.

Aljoscha’s larger “bioisms” are always created on location. He combines them with various smaller elements to intervene in local situations. His work “From Panspermia and Primordial Soup to Autopoiesis and Cognition” reflects Aljoscha’s fundamental scientific contemplation, which he translates into an extremely poetic language of design. It is here that one finds the extraordinary quality of his creations. The “primordial soup theory” defines amino acids as the fundamental building blocks of life. The “panspermia theory” hypothesises that comets transported organic molecules to Earth. The installation aims to render tangible the role of mutation as the engine of life. The translucent acrylic glass gives rise to a dynamic that brings the constant transformation of genetic information to the fore. The work rapidly evokes the fantastical thought that – following the conclusion of the exhibition – these being-like shapes will populate the entire gallery like some primeval mass.

Two new objects, #385 and #386, supplement the spatial intervention and the exploration of evolutionary theory. Aljoscha uses these to once again explore and represent the origins of life. These works have an appearance of snapshots of a story of creation: unknown species appear to be arising from these round, gleamingly reflective shapes. The reflective surfaces of the synthetic resin glass are reminiscent of the water that hosted the beginning of evolution. Water makes up as much as 60 percent of the human body – without it, we could not survive. The artist uses the glittery dust on these lifelike shapes as a form of stardust, transporting the action to distant galaxies. These are crystalline objects of colour literally created by Aljoscha by means of a painstaking process in which the acrylic paint is built up point by point.

Artistic interventions as futuristic messages

Again and again, Aljoscha uses his subversive sense of humour to locate his idiosyncratic shapes not only in public spaces or monuments, but also in the middle of nature. His interventions repeatedly emphasise the contrast between the status quo and artistic vision. They appear as a hopeful message from some better world of the future.

Dr. Wiebke Hahn