Hopeless machines
2026
Mixed media (oil and acrylic) on linen canvas
25.5 x 32 inches
The third painting of the series Fractals under Surreal Constraints, Hopeless machines refers to the human condition, to men endlessly repeating the same mistakes, defective machines trapped in a cycle of infernal self-destruction, with no hope of escape.
It is existential hell, human alienation, and the inherent violence of the species. Children, conditioned from an early age, take up arms under the averted gaze of ghostly parents, immobilized by a system that gradually erases them.
Humanity is imprisoned, 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, echoes the classic visual symbol of the atom, with its electron orbits. Its fourth wheel evokes a deviant fundamental structure, an ambiguous entity that can no longer be recognized.
An omniscient eye and technological surveillance, evoking George Orwell’s 1984? An extraterrestrial Dyson sphere?
Or an Ophanim angel, Throne of ‘God’? It is then 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 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.
The fragility of the child, plastic submachine gun in hand and facing this direct threat alone, represents the vulnerability of the next generation, the one that will have to face the consequences of its ancestors’ choices. Unless, for this young human being, war is nothing more than a futile game.
