Soleil Double [Double Sun] was filmed in Rome’s EUR district (Esposizione Universale di Roma), which was built in fascist Italy in the 1930s for the World’s Fair. A second sun, added in post-production, bathes this emblematic site of totalitarian architecture in a strange light. This landscape, which could exist on the edge of the world or feed the hypothesis of other realities, is as fascinating as it is unsettling. This video continues Grasso’s work in recent years on the ambiguity of reality.

Largely consisting of figurative scenes, portraits, and landscapes, Marc Desgrandchamps’ works often take the form of polyptychs, reflecting his interest in cinematic aesthetics. Two animal heads mounted on stakes emerge from overgrown vegetation. On the horizon line, a motif evoking the Trojan Horse draws the eye, linking the two panels. The barbarity of these totems, erected as if in ominous warning, echoes the fratricidal war in Yugoslavia (1991-2001) in a subtle blend of the real and the imagined.

This monumental and highly symbolic work draws on the tradition of allegorical painting. In a dreamlike and tormented forest with romantic and surrealist echoes, Jörg Immendorff places a huge mirror in the foreground, reflecting a studio scene in grisaille. In the background, he paints a man from behind (most likely himself) with a globe for a head, as depicted in a 16th-century engraving. Flanked by the allegorical figures of the Vices and Virtues, the globe evokes the impermanence of the world. Despite this, the figure follows the path of wisdom, symbolised by the halo illuminating his path and the owl in the foreground.

Having recently settled in Hérouval, in the Vexin region of France, Dado undertook this monumental painting as a tribute to his friend, the painter Bernard Réquichot, who had recently passed away. In the style of Hieronymus Bosch, his Grande Ferme [Great Farm] depicts a procession full of monsters moving across the vast meadow that stretches out in front of the farmhouses visible on the horizon. Transformed into a theatre where figures and animals seem to sprout from all sides, this rural domain, littered with all manner of debris, becomes a nightmarish place under Dado's brush, unless it provokes a great outburst of laughter.