Hopeless machines

2026
Mixed media (oil and acrylic) on linen canvas
25.5 x 32 inches

Hopeless machines

3rd painting in the series ‘Fractals under Surreal Constraints’, ‘Hopeless Machines’ refers to the human condition, to mankind endlessly repeating the same mistakes - malfunctioning machines trapped in an infernal cycle of self-destruction, with no hope of escape.

It is existential hell, human alienation, and the violence inherent to the species. Children, conditioned from their earliest years, take up arms under the averted gaze of ghostly parents, immobilized by a system that gradually erases them.

Humanity is imprisoned, psychologically and physically, as suggested by this circular hedge with no exit, in an open-air prison on the only habitable planet: Earth.

In the cosmos, the luminous celestial body, encircled by rotating copper wheels, reprises the classic visual symbol of the atom, with its electron orbits. Its fourth wheel evokes an impossible atom, a deviant fundamental structure, an ambiguous entity that is no longer recognizable.

Extraterrestrial UFO? Dyson sphere around a star? Ophanim angel, Throne of ‘God’? It is the unknown, the ‘other’, that one seeks to annihilate even before knowing who or what it is - the fear of the incomprehensible. Human machines, desperate and despair-inducing, end up firing at the messenger, at their god, or at the universe itself.

The painting also evokes the civilization of the atom, nuclear energy, and the hidden peril on our own planet, bristling with atomic bombs ready to explode. Yet humans look elsewhere, frozen and passive in the face of the impending catastrophe.

Finally, it also speaks of the fragility of the child, plastic submachine gun in hand, facing this direct threat alone: the next generation, for whom war is a game.”