This work is part of an ongoing cycle exploring ambivalent states of contemporary existence.
Title: Progress
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Year: 2025
Format: Portrait format (18 × 24 inches)
Colour Space: Primary colours (red, blue, yellow), complemented by green, black, and beige
Stylistic Classification: Geometric abstract composition with constructivist and surrealist elements
„Progress“ depicts a brightly coloured, crystalline cloud rising from an industrial building, combining geometric forms, birds, fragments of nature, and a central eye into a scene between consumer culture, constructed order, and the natural world.
Progress as Promise
In an affirmative reading, the cloud symbolises human creativity and innovation. Its bright colours and clear geometry evoke the designed surfaces of contemporary products, celebrating imagination, choice, and the appeal of novelties. Progress appears as an open process in which awareness, design, and responsibility remain connected.
Progress as Intervention
At the same time, the cloud rises from an industrial base, making visible that every act of design carries a price. Nature appears fragmented and intersected by lines — not as a lost ideal, but as an independent reality with its own right to integrity. Progress and nature do not stand in a relationship of good and bad, but in an irresolvable field of tension between two legitimate claims.
Conclusion
The work holds progress between promise and intervention, leaving open the tension between humanity’s claim to shape the world and nature’s claim to persist — as an ambivalent condition of a world formed by human hands. The work follows the principle of integrity of ambivalence.