VALIS Embodied

This devotional figure, bought from a private individual, undergoes a radical transfiguration through successive layers of gold acrylic paint. The gold unifies the surface, dissolves the traces of industrial manufacture and erases the object's origin as a kitsch religious product: a gesture of both paradoxical sacralisation and neutralisation, in which the popular icon becomes a contemporary sculpture through a simple coating.

The transformation intensifies with pink laser beams emitted from the eye sockets. These harmless class 1 beams turn the passive figure into an active agent: it no longer acts through touch or gesture but through pure light emission. The deliberate removal of the hands heightens this shift towards immateriality: the figure becomes an autonomous source of radiance, an incantatory presence that gives religion back a technological agency.

The dialectic between universal gold — the matter of eternity, of synthetic divinity — and bright pink laser — a contemporary phenomenon, the trace of a technologically marked time — crystallises the central question: how do we reinvent the sacred in the age of digital reproduction? The work operates less as a representation of divinity than as a performative construction of the god in the present, through material accumulation and optical emission.