SIMULACRUM: TRANSGRESSION OF HYBRID REALITIES
Between the folds of fabric and shadow, in the seams that cut through the material like fractures, an echo flickers—a fleeting image that resists fixation. Narrative fragments and abstract zones interpenetrate, dissolve, and overwrite one another. In Simulacrum, the urban enters a state of distortion: asphalt structures seep into layers of fabric, pedestrian crossings dissolve in a play of density and dissolution, bollards appear like stranded relics, uncertain of their own corporeality.
The artists reflect on the construction of reality as a fluid, fragile process in which images, signs, and social dynamics lose their fixed contours. The works are imbued with the mechanisms of the city—the rhythm of movement, the order of traffic, the traces of people and machines that traverse these landscapes daily. Yet here, within the fabric of these works, these structures are no longer rigid but malleable, vulnerable. The hard symbols of urban order are translated into soft leather, stitched fabric—as if they were made of an alien, organic substance, as if the city itself had turned into flesh.
Orx and Vinn were painters before they began working with fabric, leather, thread, and plastic. But their painterly principles have not disappeared—they have transformed. Here, painting occurs without pigment, but through touch. The rough brushstrokes of the past have become light reflections on irregular surfaces, layers of material overlapping like translucent washes of color. The expressive gesture manifests in folds, in areas of compression, in contrasts between rigidity and softness. The boundary between image and object is no longer clear—like the urban reality they examine, the works of Simulacrum are unstable structures, where perception and meaning are in constant flux.
The question of hyperreality runs through Simulacrum like an underlying tension. What is real when everything is merely surface? We live in a world where images overlay the real, where narratives are staged to construct truths, where media shape structures that extend deeper than the tangible. Orx and Vinn translate this dynamic into a material play. Their works drive forward the transgression of hybrid realities—they are not static representations but fluid structures in which the urban and the organic, the real and the simulated, merge.
Their works are flesh-made simulations—bodies without a fixed core, signs that evade definitive interpretation. They take the rigid elements of the city and make them breathe, rendering them vulnerable. Yet, they also resist pure figuration, eluding immediate readability, dissolving into zones of raw materiality. It is as if the urban itself has been set in motion, as if its order has begun to drift, its symbols reassembled from fragments of a world that no longer knows solid ground.
The viewer does not stand before these works—they step inside them. Light fractures across the textures, generating shifting intensities, fleeting images that exist only for a moment before blurring into uncertainty. These works are not mere compositions—they are threshold spaces in which perception must constantly realign.
Simulacrum is a body of surfaces, of seams and scars, of structures that refuse rigidity. An archive of a world in transformation, a membrane through which the dynamics of time pulse. There is no center here, no final truth—only the endless flicker between what we see and what we believe we see.
Iven Orx & Aaron Vinn
PUP PLAY
2024
Fabric, Plastic, Leather
242 x 290 x 2 cm
95,28 in x 114,17 in x 0,79 in
