BULLETPROOF … I WISH I WAS, 2022
SOLD
BULLETPROOF … I WISH I WAS, 2022
500 x 500 mm (Framed size 650mm x 650mm x 100mm)
Oil Paint and Digital Collage on C-type print, face mount glossy plexiglass / alu-dibond 6+2mm, floating in clear perspex box
“Bulletproof … i wish I was” by AD-Reflex is a ‘palimpsest’ of human effort and history. In ancient Greece, a ‘palimpsest’ was a parchment written upon twice, provoking the idea of vanishing words, memories, and stories, and implying a process of layering and retrieving. The ‘palimpsest’ speaks to a cohabitation of seemingly alien narratives and media folding and unfolding in dialogue, disclosing a state of duality, where we feel both aware and unaware, empowered and disempowered.
AD-Reflex’s entire sensibility appears to be stretched between irreconcilable extremes. In their hands, history and fact, beauty and despair, turn out to be disturbingly malleable and imprecise. They draw on diverse sources that might provide the mythical structure to underpin their imagery, from the recycling efforts in Agbogbloshie, Greek mythology, Francis Bacon and Twenty First Century technologies, all co-exist freely, and are in perpetual transformation.
Through extensive layering, their work borders on the alchemical where no clear distinction can be drawn between the painterly and the digital. Painting clashes with technology in the form of 3D-modelling, digital collage, and digital photo manipulation techniques on print and DIASEC, to form a distinctly new visual language that is resolutely grounded in the ‘here’ and ‘now’.