Mineral Vegetal Digital

Paintings & Video installation​

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solo show

 

@99loopgallery on 03 - 26 March 2026 in Cape Town

 

Press release:

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"Jonathan Silverman’s new body of work remains deeply rooted in his ongoing enquiry into whether our digital lives are dislocating humans ever further from the organic environment and in what ways this detachment is simultaneously natural and dehumanizing.

This paradox appears at the centre of humanity’s current existential crisis where reality overload, information chaos, and the relentless visual bludgeoning we experience every day (and the accompanying schizophrenia and erosion of cognitive sensibilities engendered) is shaping personal and political responses to the world we perceive and attempt to navigate.

This contradiction influences everything from climate degradation to racial inequality and the spread of political conspiracy theories. It is central to the contemporary fascination with trans-humanism, which is not unnatural in its emphasis on moving to another state of being — but may ultimately not feel very good. Instead, it is unsettling.

In continuing to sublimate images of our natural environment into fragmented landscapes and in exploring the space between the physical and the virtual, Silverman has ventured further down the digital rabbit hole. What emerges through colour and composition is a pretty, but putrefied, psychedelia. Sterile negative spaces and “black-outs”. A sense of nausea and repulsion, but also wonder and fascination. These works could be Memento mori from a dystopian and dislocated future. Harbingers from the present. Relics from a disenchanted past.

Truth is ambiguous. So too, what we perceive as natural or unnatural." 

 

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