Ariel Helyes
‘Born today dead today’ brings together two works characterized by the artist’s ongoing interest in ideas of powerlessness and death, as seen in the context of branded design, esoteric psychology or finance.
In the mute video piece ‘The Healing’, appropriated and reversed CGI disaster movie footage gives way to the possibility of recovery for the world. The sense of scale conveyed by the production heavy originals enables a global sense of healing, an undoing of the damage done e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e, through a simple act of reversal.
The anti-gravitational visuality of the debris and concrete slabs in the video returns in the second work titled ‘Evaporating car I’. As the car keeps losing its materiality, dissipating, while simultaneously trying to cling to it, the work imitates the quick cycles of rebirth and obsolescence in design – but also the hopeful possibility of its negation: the breaking of the circuit, the realisation of real death.
Works in the show
The Healing
FHD video
1’52” (3’38”)
2020
Evaporating car
digital
varying dimensions
2020
Ariel Helyes (who has since changed his name to Dani Marcel) is an artist based in London. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2020. He is part of the conceptual creative agency Declined & Deceased. Recent shows include 50/50 in FOLD, London, Attention anticipation Anxiety Relief Release in Fitzrovia Gallery, London and Nothing in that Drawer in 10 Hanover, London.
