Living Room Extravaganza - Riot Gear Takes Tea by the Television
Post-painting
Circa 2026
The party never stops in Ha Ha Land. Champagne is poured, hats are tipped, and somewhere beyond the French windows the sky is on fire. These post-paintings are set in a living room that has swallowed the world, and everyone is on the guest list. Neocons and hawks clink glasses with the bourgeoisie, and both rub shoulders with ordinary citizens in borrowed finery. Power and spectacle mingle in the same room, sharing canapés and small talk while the jets pass overhead. The guests have forgotten who is hosting and who is on the menu.
Each work is built the way a dream builds itself, through collision rather than logic. Photographic fragments are torn, smeared, scanned and repainted until image and brushstroke can’t be told apart. Faces dissolve into pigment, and pixels glitch into gesture. Digital error becomes a form of expressive violence, a corrupted signal broadcasting from the heart of the soirée. The results look less like pictures than like memories misfiring, the way an era remembers itself when it is too busy performing to pay attention.
The mood is festive and the laughter is nervous. This is the humour of the absurd: the deliberate nonsense of those who answered a world gone mad by refusing to behave sensibly. It is also the gallows cheer of philosophers who announced the death of certainty and then kept right on dancing. Ha Ha Land asks what is left of conviction, authority and class when they are reduced to costume, and who actually pays for the party. The answer arrives as a punchline, and the punchline is a mirror.
Nothing here is quite tragic and nothing is safe. Pleasure and catastrophe share a sofa, and the more beautifully the room is arranged, the louder the ruin sounds underneath. Come in, take a drink, and don’t look up.
