Living Room Extravaganza - Plein Air Painters
Post-painting
Circa 2026
Living Room Extravaganza, Plein Air Painters is constructed through a process of accumulation, disruption and repainting. AI-generated imagery becomes raw material rather than destination, fragments are assembled, digitally painted over, obscured, scraped back and allowed to collide with glitches, painterly gestures and areas of visual collapse. The image moves between the photographic and the painted until neither can quite be trusted.
That instability mirrors its subject. Catastrophe unfolds beyond the swimming pool with the strange tranquillity of a scheduled spectacle. Children play, champagne waits, painters arrange their canvases, while aircraft cross a sky already swollen by the architecture of destruction. Nobody runs. The apocalypse has simply become part of the view.
We have become anaesthetised to images of war. Destruction arrives continuously through screens, compressed, repeated, scrolled past, until the unimaginable acquires the familiarity of wallpaper. Here, war occupies the same visual field as leisure, another image competing for our attention before the next one arrives.
The plein air painters sit at the centre of this contradiction. They are making paintings inside a painting, attempting to record a landscape that is disappearing in front of them. Their canvases become imperfect echoes of an already unstable reality, a process that reflects the construction of the work itself, where machine-generated representation is repeatedly interrupted by the human hand.
Painting becomes both witness and complicity. Around it, leisure persists with almost obscene confidence, as though privilege might negotiate its own private ceasefire with history.
The artwork is ultimately about distance, between event and image, destruction and consumption, machine and hand, seeing and understanding. Perhaps this is the contemporary condition, not that we cannot see the disaster, but that we have become extraordinarily skilled at seeing it without feeling it, anaesthetised by repetition, spectators to catastrophe as it quietly becomes part of the everyday
