These large-scale tableaux interweave sculptural explorations, large format archival prints, and personal objects—assembled, staged, and photographed in situ as a charged equilibrium, woven into the Macrocosmi Fabrica.

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My artistic heroes are the great assemblagists—Picasso, Cornell, Rauschenberg—and artists like Richter who understand that history is not a monument but an unstable force that must be wrestled with, unmade, and remade. The ephemerality of early work in theatrical set design and window dressing was also foundational.

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17th-century engravings, apotropaic talismans, geologic specimens, memento mori, and museum artifacts drawn from disparate cultural histories permeate the work—not as static relics, but as catalytic material. Their forms are staged, photographed, and transformed, entering new relationships that extend beyond their original contexts.

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Each composition evolves through a meditative cycle of photography, layering, painting, erasure, and digital reconstruction. Often unfolding over years, the process moves through successive states until transfigured—its sources still visible, yet fundamentally altered.

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This is not a sober or orderly vision. The work sustains a disciplined intoxication: a tension between documentary memory and digital rupture, between Mnemosyne and Dionysus—excess held within deliberate structure.

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The resulting images are constructed fields in which sacred and profane, antique and modern, analog and digital elements remain in active tension. Each composition captures a suspended moment in which the underlying latticework of the Macrocosmi Fabrica is briefly rent.

 

James Mansour