UNPOPULAR SCIENCE
UTOPIA PARKWAY Gallery, 14/01/2022
Futuristic bestiary
By
Silvia Grijalba
Adamo Dimitriadis has us accustomed to showing us elegant happiness, in his own way. To recover that world in Technicolor, of perfect houses, well-combed women and men with beards perfectly trimmed like the yard of his American suburban house.
Adamo Dimitriadis has done it again. If we look without stopping too much, we see dream houses straight out of a quiet American middle-class dream and landscapes with that touch of unreality that only nature provides. And I say that he has done it again because that universe of blue skies and red cars, of people in flared skirts that Adamo Dimitriadis knows how to mix with the visions of Philip K Dick and that he already showed us in exhibitions such as “Terminal City” or “ Memories of the Future” here goes to the extreme. It is as if the protagonists of "Please don't eat the daisys", after living in the development of Ballard's "Cocaine Nights", and spending the summer in the Houllebecq´s "Plateforme" resort, became neighbors of Openheimer in Los Álamos .
In “Unpopular Science” the spirit of magazines like “Popular Mechanics” is recovered. Pseudoscientific dissemination for happy families convinced that the Progress of science will lead their children to a better world.
A Bestiary of futuristic illusion where fairy-tale houses have CO2 chimneys, where the clouds turn pink again (a constant in this artist's work), there are nuclear power plants in the shape of Hello Kitty and children play with laser guns.
“Unpopular Science” has “Science and Morality” as its subtitle. So this futuristic Bestiary would be more connected with the Phisiologus of Berne than with the Etymologies of Saint Isidore of Seville. As in the Middle Ages, the current post-pandemic time could not be more appropriate to address an issue: morality in science, that great current taboo. In these times when the champions of the space race are billionaires who advocate taking biotechnology to the extreme and turning (us) into cyborgs and where Burroughs' Soft Machine is a much more appropriate simile than referring to Huxley or Orwell. In a time of uncertainty, fear and delirious illusions, this futuristic Bestiary is essential.
Irony is more present than ever in these works. Adamo does not pontificate. He shows, in a terrifyingly kind way, what could be, what perhaps we do not see, what can happen and what perhaps has already happened and what we call the future. Always impeccable, with absolute elegance, with scientists in suits and ties and with a smile. May the Apocalypse catch us in good stead.
New Mexico. November 2021 DC (After Covid)