The exhibition is conceived as a set whose matrix is the painted work. Philip Grözinger paints a world that doesn't exist, a society nourished by modernist utopias in which living beings desperately try to develop a strategy of joy. The colors are flamboyant, pop, childlike and joyful. The lights are radiant. Flowers are omnipresent. The eyes of the human-looking figures are wide, ecstatic, pathologically focused on objects that could make them happy: a bouquet of flowers, a cell phone, a swimming pool, the sun, the sky, a radio or a television. The figures strive to play, to maintain a life of leisure in an oh-so-superficial universe.These de-realized, anaesthetized figures choose immediate pleasures, quick gratification and dopamine bulimia. Their exorbitant eyes and apathetic gazes manifest behaviors as addictive as they are robotic. Our lives must remain instagrammable, in other words: the backdrops of capitalist fantasies symptomatic of a collective renunciation.

A motif is embedded in various places: a wooden ladder. The ladder embodies escape, evasion, the need to get away, to look elsewhere. The ladders rise up from the mountains, out of the open windows of houses and apartments. Their presence offers a critical opening for reflection on our withdrawn, unconscious, selfish and individualistic lifestyles. Philip Grözinger speaks of escapism. The dictionary defines this little-used concept as follows: "An attitude that consists in withdrawing from the world and civic life, through flight or disillusionment, as opposed to speaking out or taking individual or social action. Escape from reality." So the artist creates a universe where the real and the fake are blurred. He sets the scene for an artificial, dysfunctional interior: a fireplace on which ceramic and bronze works are placed, a wooden television, a footstool, a game console, a bouquet of stylized flowers in minecraft style, etc. Philip Grözinger extracts motifs from his paintings to turn them into sculptural objects. He extracts motifs from his paintings to create sculptural objects. He writes: "For me, it's all meant to symbolize the false nostalgia for a time when everything was better, and the retreat into the private sphere."^[1]

In this escape from social and political reality, Philip Grözinger points out that "fake furniture and objects must simulate comfort and nostalgia while the world is on fire." For a long time now, we've been living in the knowledge that our species is slowly disappearing as a result of our extractivist and polluting activities. We try to live a normal life in the knowledge that genocide is underway in Gaza, that war is being prolonged in Ukraine, others in Congo, Sudan and elsewhere. Climate catastrophes are also transforming the daily lives of millions of people. We try to hold on to a comfortable lifestyle while the human world teeters on the brink. In this sense, appearances here are largely deceptive. Philip Grözinger's plastic choices function like a decoy, a thick layer of makeup or a mask. His work depicts a loss of bearings and values. Although the animated film is based on a painting, it is itself entirely generated by artificial intelligence. If omnipresent scales invite us to rethink a global situation, they also urge us to resist, to take back control of our existences to free them from mortifying dominant thinking, alienating algorithms and anxiety-provoking information (true or false).

Text by Julie Crenn