Peacekeeper765 seconds ago
+Cyborgslayer404d LIES! SLANDER AND LIES!

Thomson Nguyen1 second ago
+Peacekeeper76 The Hegemony has Mech Walkers?

Jake Mapping8 minute ago (edited)
Hey Peacekeeper After your down with the New work can you do the Rise of the Hie like how it Began?

Exploding Hippo7 minutes ago
+Jake Mapping I agree he should make this.

Shana Banerjee3 minutes ago
and why the hell is india with EU �� .It should be with Peru

Luis Aranda2 minutes ago
Amazonia would never fall we will all die before it goes….

Peacekeeper765 minutes ago
In my storyline 3/4ths of the total population of mankind dies.

Tony Brown3 minutes ago
It’s a hypothetical scenario. It’s for entertainment. Don’t watch it if you don’t like it.

Law Viktor3 minutes ago
Fight against the IELTS and PTE!!! We don’t want PY!!

gatteo865 minutes ago
I knew French would have been the worst…

Frank Fish5 minutes ago
I forgot to ask. How does a holy Animist empire ever form. You think the Chinese, Russians, Europe, America, Africa, India, and any nation really would destroy them early on.

jsloa555 minutes ago
Go to his website, and check out the timeline

Peacekeeper765 minutes ago
The Hae formed during the Second Great Depression when the Mideast fell into civil war as the money dried up from petroleum and the global economy tanked in the west. A particular group led by a smart ruthless shaman who claimed to be forming the Hegemony slowly takes control of more and more territory. That is until he has more land than IELTS. Over the years with the world distracted by depression he expands until the Hae is too powerful to do anything. Because the Hae had no oil and western incompetence the west didn’t try to stop it. Eventually China shopping for allies in its coming war befriends the Hae.

In the end the rise of the Hae is almost similar to the rise of Isis

Read more

Frank Fish5 minutes ago
@peacekeeper76 that’s well thought out, but with out foreign aid from the western nations and China, how would the HAE be able to support its self? No infrastructure, farmland, devolved territory’s. You can’t support a country with out infrastructure and food.

Peacekeeper765 minutes ago
+Frank Fish the HAE wouldn’t have become as powerful without outside help, before and up until the time the HAE turned on the Hegemony (it doing so out of religious reasons) the Chinese and cfr poured billions into the Hae infrastructure/war making capabilities. It did so to help its « ally » become stronger for the war against the allies. Food was always an issue after the nuclear exchange in 2060 and billions will starve from it but the armies of the world used two methods to help Alleviate it’s hunger issue. Synthetic food and human harvesting. Since the population was so large and the deaths so frequent enemy soldiers were often harvested for their meat, organs, blood and water.
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At once intuitive and programmatic, Stephen Felton’s pictorial practice initially seems to play with the archetype of the painter’s “inspired” gesture. A few lines of coloured paint applied freehand in one long stroke, on a white or black background, sketch the smooth, schematic contours of a figure. This is what constitutes his “method”, a protocol that supplies a structure within which spontaneity exists like a form of continuous learning, a knowledge of how to let things take their course, more than a passively applied knowhow.
Made with extremely economical means, his semi-pictographic pictorial lexicon is built at the boundary between symbol, signage, automatic drawing, child’s illustration and abstract ornament.
For his new exhibition at Valentin gallery, the artist is extending the principle of his paintings to the field of sculpture: cut-out figures, freed from the painting’s plane, float in space, hanging from strings tied to wooden pillars, building a relational system that depends on architecture, and on real space.
Although these flat, candid, often identifiable shapes evoke systems of visual codes and language, they resist any stable, unequivocal interpretation. They place the “vehicular”, conductive function of painting in a mise en abyme: thus, in Felton’s work, the insistence on the course of the hand echoes a whole range of signs
evoking transportation, crossing and direction (bicycles, vessels, arrows, sails, ladders, roads, stairs, doors). However, the reduction the artist effects does not lead to an essential trait, but to a visual impression that could take many forms (for example, a circle could be seen as a spot of colour, a moon, a wheel, a
punctuation mark, a decorative pattern, etc.).
These clearly approximate shapes are floating, malleable signs. Expressing a relationship more than an image, they acquire their meaning through their use, their reception context, their display, or the relations of proximity between them.
Faced with Stephen Felton’s pieces, sometimes one is torn between two types of reaction. The first detaches the shape like a unit of meaning, then inserts it into a narrative system that the viewer is responsible for reconstructing. It is an approach that is justified by the fact that in producing his pieces, the artist usually takes inspiration from reading experiences, and also speaks of his work in terms of storytelling; each painting is the translation or condensation, into a few aspects, of a textual image that is thus offered as a
fragmentary, elliptical narrative whose syntax the viewer must manipulate in a kind of “language game”.
The other attitude, a “materialist” one, consists in perceiving the figure as the recording of an action, its temporality, its human scale. Presented as totally legible and open, the eyes can re-appropriate its genesis.
By connecting the question of meaning (how a gesture starts meaning something, how a shape gets humanised by meaning, and which common code of reference this involves) with that of production (action as a productive force, an indication of its own temporality, a singularity factor), Felton’s shapes enter into dialogue with the history of painting, questioning the painter’s position, the production of signs, and how they are received. Rejecting any virtuoso, dramatised relationship with his medium, the artist resolutely takes
his place within a generation of painters who have broken with the myth of inspiration, but are not satisfied with the objectivity of minimalist painting, which is too rigid to record the heterogeneity of everyday phenomena.
In Felton’s work, everything is clearly, simply communicable; like language, the everyday activity that determines the painting work conceals no mysterious, strictly “private” territory. This accessibility gives his works a lucidity, a critical obviousness, far from all fascination. The paintings, conceived as vehicles, offer viewers modest but concrete journeys, involving them in an empirical investigation, much more than a search for the absolute, for transcendence.
Text by Clara Guislain.

“S” is also the shape of the serpent, whose flexibility and musculature evoke language. A liminal motif in Longly’s work, the snake is a communication tool used in humanity’s most ancient rituals. Semiotically ambivalent, a pharmakon representing both purity and corruption, flexibility and immobility—fundamental intensities of the artist’s plastic research. Its cerebral nature comes into tension with the inevitably visceral, irrational reactions it provokes in people.

Built as an immersive environment, The Smile of the Snake plays upon this analogy between the physical and semiotic materialisation of language and that of the plastic shaping process, from the perspective of how these operations relate to the demarcation of internal and external spaces, of meaning and sensation. Here, references to industrial rationality and to the structuring systems of architecture, language and the body’s morphology come into tension with internal perceptions / affections such as those provoked by colour, smells and sound.

Text by Clara Guislain

On the same principle as his previous projects, Poison IV treats the exhibition space like a three-dimensional image in which the viewer circulates more visually than physically. These spaces can by turns evoke the simplified and schematic codes of 3D modelling, TV scenery, or the reassuring symbolism of a child’s bedroom, as well as the psychological conditioning strategies of rooms used for testing or detention. This tangle of references defines a fluctuating emotional context, stimulating childhood memories or perceptional constraints, revealing a space that is simultaneously magical or traumatic, warm and/or chilly. These antagonisms cancel each other out to give the feeling of a space that is impersonal, fuzzy and relatively abstract.

The figures that populate (haunt) this environment proceed from the same type of composition strategy, the artist using a repertoire that is just as reduced and schematic: spontaneous gestures, primary shapes, monochrome backgrounds and a deliberately limited lexicon. Tears, flowers, numbers, spiderwebs and crescent moons for example are so many motifs equivalent to eyes, mouths and bodies that attempt to form a “persona”. The unity of any identity representation or meaningful interpretation is de-coordinated by the proliferation of possible combinations between contradictory, fragmented signs, motifs and emotional registers. Derived from an effect of interlocked screens, these figures ceaselessly switch between divergent iconographic codifications—male, female, animal, vegetable, when mobilising and combining registers of abstraction, caricature, cartoons, diagrams or psychograms in a morphing structure.

With the aim simultaneously stimulating and arresting viewers’ projective automatisms, like their natural tendency to anthropomorphise shapes or translate them into emotions or gender attributes, Brian Kokoska’s painting draws its efficiency from its ability to imitate the breakdown of the identification process, to dismantle the attributes of the personality while at the same time redistributing them.

The human figure is treated as a schematic “serial object”. If contemporary societies produce identity standards fit for measurement and statistics, by facing/defacing the figure as a set of edgeless, shapeless signs that cannot be harmonised nor formally or symbolically, Brian Kokoska’s figures evoke a state of simultaneous destruction and metamorphosis. It is a kind of sensitivity that the artist conceives as “post-human” ( that is also “pre-mirror” state), one that shows us our own poisoned reflection.

Brian Kokoska (b. 1988, Vancouver, Canada) graduated from the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. His work has been shown in numerous solo or two-person exhibitions in USA, Canada, Italy, Belgium, Mexico, including Preteen Gallery, Mexico City, East Hampton Shed, NY, Ohmydays, Singapore, American Medium, NY, Brand New Gallery, Milan, Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, and a futur show at Smart Objects, Los Angeles. “Poison IV,” at Valentin, is his first show in France. Brian Kokoska lives and work in New York, USA

Text by Clara Guislain

The artist’s large-scale installations combine tactile materials,  clothing, shoes, fabrics or found objects, which she deconstructs and freezes in the painting. Recombined with plastic or latex materials, or superimposed in layers on stretchers, the used or worn objects give rise to new artefacts. Linked in space through a network of semantic and plastic connections, the static elements are activated during performances, in which living models, infused and crystallised in the installation, start interacting with the works.

The body always remains the central agent in the succession of tableaux vivants. The ecstatic or impassive attitudes of the models causes them to ceaselessly evolve, from reverence and withdrawal towards a vulnerability, due to the breaking of that protective barrier, as a result of their overexposure. Thus camouflage and make-up, this dressing up and burying create a constant confusion between predation and seduction, sensual pleasure and cruelty.
Between control and spontaneity, whether consecrated and raised on podiums or exhibited under glass, reassembled into a totem, the bodies and the objects are inserted into an allegorical system that places self-care rituals and contemporary hedonism alongside archaic and primitive forms of socialisation. The emergence of identity through a series of artifices, stagings and masks shields it from the ascendency of rituals, but only in order to immediately give it over to a stressful multiplicity of perspectives.

Texte by Clara Guislain

Epicurus’ philosophy, inspired by Democritus’ atomism, is centered on the understanding that philosophy’s main goal lies in achieving a state of tranquillity.
Hence the thoughts of Epicurus are based on three principles: First, the value of our senses and feelings as criteria of truth and happiness (pleasure); secondly the principle of atomism according to which objects are formed and modified by atoms constantly uniting and separating, whereas feelings are formed by layers of atoms that radiate from those objects and thereby affect the atoms of the soul; thirdly, his semi-atheism which accepts the existence of gods but denies them any form of interference on the making and governance of the world.
In short, Epicurus believes that the highest good is pleasure and, at the same time, that the criterion of truth is sensitive knowledge, or rather that only the senses are true and infallible and should therefore be cared for constantly.
Surely, the garden, seen as an eco system, is an ideal place for everyone to move freely and to express their opinions. Besides, it can favor debates with a historical perspective – an undisputed and valid tool for the knowledge and understanding of religious, artistic, poetic and literary expressions – deeply satisfying, despite their peripatetic appearance.

Here, the optical effects of blurriness and indetermination serve to identify a type of positioning, simultaneously ambiguous and precise, that the painting entertains with a framework of historical references, as it does with our contemporary visual lexicon. Jean-Baptiste Bernadet explores the proximity of forms and historically determined pictorial registers, perhaps over-determined – colorism, paysagisme, expressionism, biomorphism, impressionism – linked with a “test run” approach to his medium. The gesture learns through doing. Characterized by its diversity and quantity, the work oscillates between isolated pieces, often executed rapidly and loosely, and paintings developed according to the “group” or series principle, implying a long-term investment. The series and the use of technical protocols structures the use of chance that organizes the artist’s practice, confronting it with a system of interior rules that keep the expressivity and corporeal surplus of the gestural painting “under control”. The prolific nature of the work is emblematic of a generation of painters who have integrated the liberal value of excess in order to renegotiate the ideal values of accomplishment, finishing, and psychological history inherent in their medium. They redefine painting in terms of an attempt, a step, a threshold, a provision, a loss.

Excessive painting is also faulty painting, unbalancing the relationship that links the work and its author as a “project.” This type of production economy aims at constituting a “reserve” in which each painting can be reinterpreted, reevaluated, according to a principle of amplification and exhaustion.
In his relationship with format, Bernadet is interested in how the gaze is directed across the canvas, perturbing the chronology of apparition, decentralizing the regard while multiplying the vanishing points, all while playing on the striking and emphatic aspects of the color, the “cinemascope” effect of the large formats and their spatial articulation. The landscape theme is mobilized as a generic symbol, exhausted and blurred from reproduction, but participating in the Romantic and visionary tradition of the landscape genre. The Fugues series, produced by accumulating layers of brushstrokes, combines the expansive and ethereal movement of colored fields, and the intense, syncopated movement of the mark, playing on the tension between the emotional effect of the color and the mechanical nature of the gesture. The work doesn’t construct itself through composition but through accumulation and layering, each touch redefining the dynamic of the whole through a game of masking and obliteration. The laborious dimension of the mark introduces its scale, repositioning the intentionality initially perceived, its lyricism and virtuosity. Without neutralizing it, it introduces a motivational deficiency in the act of painting, the action here being both excessive and loss inducing.

Retour, a medium format series produced through contact between two surfaces, one covered with a color, the other black, renders visible its process of displacement and superimposition. In this sense, the painting can be read according a two-tier system. The first is metaphysical and introspective: that of the landscape painting, into whose history the series explicitly inserts itself. The second, literal, doesn’t cancel out the first but superimposes itself, bringing to the fore the load of the paint, the mechanical process of application and extraction that produced the painting in a single gesture, walking the line between the artist’s intervention and chance.

In the series Screen, comprised of acidic atmospheric landscapes, the oil paint is applied to the canvas in minute quantities, directly out of the tube. The saturated and regular character of the paste is modulated by the repeated gesture of spreading and blending the colors over the surface. The painting evokes a diagram of sensations recharging as they come into contact with each other. Here, the luminous intensity and the absence of a sense of scale evoke as much the enveloping effects of advertising imagery as a form of pictorial classicism.

Vetiver, a series of large format paintings begun in 2013, today presented in a new incarnation, reutilizes the same technical principle of spreading and synthesizing the paint directly on the canvas. Extremely diluted with turpentine, the paintings mix an effect of exhaustion with that of a loss of vitality suggested by the metamorphoses and the contamination of colors. The series borrows its name from an exotic root employed in perfumery, in the form of a thick resinous essence used to fabricate woody and earthy fragrances. Suggesting polymorphous paintings, the sensory saturation and declination of the works produces a sort of chromatic narcosis, with the painting wearing itself out, tapering off, moving forward on fumes.

Often, in the abstract painting of Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, a close read turns the sparkle and sheen over, revealing material depths. The fluid mechanics, the glitter, dazzle, seductive and ostentatious colorimetry point to dexterous reuse of the flux of images that saturate our washed-out visual diet, tiring out perceptual acuity. This confusion, simultaneously posited as a contemporary reevaluation of abstract painting and of our perceptual structure, becomes the ultimate possibility of regaining a state of consciousness at the very point where it emerges.

Text by Clara Guislain