Order, disorder

There are nuns with gold teeth, sacred caves, swans, playing cards and bells. Boards of Canada drifts into the picture. Ancient Hindu relics are coupled with clamps, cables and mechanical parts. A prehistoric Venus is plugged into electricity. Mineral dust becomes painting; LED light emerges through scratched surfaces. Welcome to Order <-> Disorder, a new solo exhibition by Bali-based Italian artist Filippo Sciascia, bringing together painting and sculpture in an exploration of archaeology, ancient belief, science, technology and our increasingly unstable relationship with images. At its centre is entropy: the movement of systems from order towards disorder, and the continual transformation of energy and matter. For Sciascia, this becomes a way of thinking about the present. Technology is accelerating, artificial intelligence is changing what we understand an image to be, and ancient systems of belief increasingly coexist with technology as a new form of faith. The exhibition begins in the cave. Sciascia presents paintings of ancient rock-cut shrines and meditation niches that he encountered unexpectedly in the forests around Ubud, near Bali’s Pakerisan River—an experience he describes as a “spiritual accident.” Fascinated by caves as sites of some of humanity’s earliest mark-making, Sciascia sees them as evidence of our fundamental need to communicate. Rendered through oil paint, scratching and LED illumination, these works bring prehistoric impulses into contact with contemporary technology. In the main gallery, a new series pushes this enquiry into perception itself. Using bands of tape, Sciascia paints only portions of each image, leaving the eye to construct what is missing. An Ace, a swan, a bell, a theatre and a flower have been chosen for their contradictory associations: victory and defeat, beauty and aggression, disruption and order. Their graphic surfaces draw equally from oil painting, printed matter, scientific diagrams, post-punk fanzines and music culture. Small sculptural assemblages extend these collisions into three dimensions. Balinese antiques and fragments of Hindu iconography meet rulers, clamps, cables and mechanical components. Sacred objects encounter utilitarian ones; gods of light meet machines designed to regulate heat. Across thousands of years, different human attempts to understand and control the world are compressed into singular objects. Elsewhere, Sciascia abandons representation altogether, using dust, earth and mineral pigments gathered from caves directly on cloth. Rather than painting nature, nature becomes the painting—part of an experimental process the artist likens to scientific observation and discovery. The exhibition ends in the contemporary image-world. A nun with gold teeth, sourced online, retains the digital “play” symbol within the painting. Internet imagery, film, music and popular culture enter Sciascia’s work as another form of reality, raising a question that has become particularly urgent with AI: what is real when an image no longer needs an original? From the first marks made in caves to images generated and circulated through screens, Order <-> Disorder traces humanity’s persistent attempt to understand, represent and organise the world—and the disorder that continually escapes our control. Order becomes disorder. And from disorder, something else begins.