Doily Apocalypse

The Doily Apocalypse centers on a round, scorched table overlaid with a large circular drawing burned into paper—an anamorphic landscape after Coninxloo. The image remains unreadable until it is reflected, gathered, and revealed through a mirrored vase filled with roses. As the roses slowly wilt and decompose, their organic decay stands in stark opposition to the static, burnt landscape below.
Roses embody a duality: they are both highly bred hybrids and natural species, cultivated to satisfy our shifting ideals of beauty. In the Doily Apocalypse, this dark complicity is staged through a visual reconciliation—the burning forest interior only resolves into coherence within the vase, amid the « constructed » roses that reflect our intervention in nature.
Coninxloo developed a vison of landscape at the end of the 16th century that was influenced by Altdorfer and the Danube school from a century earlier, transforming the forest landscape into the subject rather than using it as a stage. This represents a fundamental shift in humanity’s relation to and vision of nature itself.