Histoire et destin - My dreams they’ll never surrender 2014

Gian Maria Tosatti made this image of wheat in what looks like a very old room, and the effect is both uncanny and compelling. The wheat is so thickly planted and the room is so enclosed that they really push against each other, formally. This kind of tension, for me, is where the juice is. The walls have this aged, almost distressed quality, like they’ve seen a few centuries go by, while the wheat is so immediate, present, and tactile. You can almost feel the dryness and the sharp little hairs on the stalks. The combination of these two very different textures and temporalities is what gives the image such an odd, surreal feeling. And then there’s that single, unwavering light source, making the scene almost theatrical. Think of Caspar David Friedrich and his lone figures in nature. Tosatti has a similar sensibility, evoking something spiritual from the mundane.