A Third Pill

Artists Adam Nehring
Genre Painting
Edition Survival 20
  • scattered project, 2022

The painting interventions into the hospital space metaphorically illustrate various unapparent relations between fictional and real elements. The starting point for them were scenes from the cult movie “The Matrix” from 1999 and how they were received. The Wachowski sisters drew inspiration from Jean Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation, among other things (it appears on the screen at 8:27 minutes). Baudrillard was not thrilled with this film. His criticism was later shared by Slavoj Žižek in his The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema: “Of course Matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality: if you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.” What Žižek demands is a third pill, one that will enable him to see fictional and real elements in their context; a panacea to perceive the relationship between them and to notice the dialectical movement of their mutual interpenetration. While creating his painting throwups, Nehring was inspired by the symbolism of colours borrowed from the cult scene from “The Matrix“, in which the protagonist, Neo, has to choose between a blue and red pill. If he takes the blue one, he will wake up in his familiar world and live in an illusion until the end. If he opts for the red one, he will learn the terrifying truth about reality, but he will become free.

*One of the works from this series uses a graphic depicting the Klein Bottle, designed by Thomas

F. Banchoff, David Kaplan and Jeff Beall; source: http://alem3d.obidos.org/.