In symphony with its subject, the exhibition achieves a sense of something frustratingly fleeting and unobtainable, as seen for example in the constant movement and morphing of Juan Fontanive’s motorised flipbook of exotic birds (“Ornithology I”, 2015) and the ever-shifting kaleidoscopic patterns in Alois Kronschlaeger’s “Multicolored Cube Configuration #2” (2015). Meanwhile, Mario Navarro’s assemblage “Marmor Isodomum” (2015) brings together a neat and well-organised collection of discarded marble pieces, as if the overlooked scraps and leftovers of luxurious objects that decorate opulent homes have come together to form a little utopia of their own. Across the bone-bare industrial room, Ishmael Randall Weeks’ untitled installation with live plants (2015) plays with futility and impermanence, since the artist has used the plants as stencils to spray paint on the white surface behind them. Traversing this twisted workshop of defeated happiness, one realises how our fabricated notion of ideal existence, our “Paradise”, is both chimaeric and, ironically, comical in its ambition.

The exhibition “Paradise Syndrome” is the latest pop-up event from PEANA, a platform for contemporary Latin American and Spanish art founded by Ana Perez Escoto, and will remain on display at the former factory of “Puccio European Marble Works” till November 18, 2015. Participating artists include Silvina Arismendi, Adrian S. Bara, Aldo Chaparro, Juan Fontanive, Ricardo Gonzalez, Alois Kronschlaeger, Alberto Lopez, Norman Mooney, Mario Navarro, Ishmael Randall Weeks, Francisco Ugarte and Alexis Zambrano.