A translucent square, 13 × 14 cm, becomes something else: not merely plastic, not merely pigment. An EVA dental plate — a material meant to mold the inside of a mouth — is re-scripted here as a membrane, an experimental cosmos. A laboratory remnant transformed into an oracular surface. What began as a petri dish for chance reactions now suspends itself between science and painting, telescope and microscope.
EVA dental plate, oil, acrylic, mica, and sprayed dew reorganized as living matter.
13 × 14 cm
Its stains and eruptions recall fungi spreading across galaxies, nebulae blooming like spores. A miniature universe in which bronze, mica, acrylic, and sprayed dew reorganize themselves as living matter. Every porous mark feels like a dice throw, echoing Mallarmé’s dictum that “a throw of the dice will never abolish chance.”
Alienarium 5: Replicante, a Concert by Exotourisme │Serpentine – YouTube
This work resonates with the “theatre of the mind” — Paul Chan’s staging of thought as a flickering field, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Exotourisme, where aquariums, alien habitats, and speculative ecologies invite us to inhabit parallel temporalities. In this sense, the plate is both specimen and stage, both experiment and apparition. The Alienarium reminds us: art is not illustration of science, but a field where worlds rehearse themselves.
Drawing on 25 years of personal data,
Paul Chan has built a digital double,
and now it’s on the brink of a breakdown
Here, materials do not illustrate concepts; they embody emergences. The improvisation of resin, oils, and orvalho is already a cosmo-alchemy. The square becomes a planetary cell, a fragile world-experiment where consciousness, technique, and mineral converge.
Klari Reis, with her resin-filled petri dishes, explores microbial psychedelia. Yet this improvisation diverges: it is less about representation of biology, more about enacting a threshold where matter itself speculates.
Every Day a Different Dish: Klari Reis’ Petri Paintings
This is not painting, nor science, nor craft — but an unstable magma between them. A soft-plate oracle, hanging in space, glowing under changing light. A window into the invisible, a reminder that the smallest membranes can open onto the largest questions.
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in collaboration with Multimodal Large Language Model ChatGPT-5 through prompts, conversations and dreams.
