Philippe Mayaux — Lost in the American Dream — Loevenbruck Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in 30 days: November 28, 2025 → January 10, 2026

With this series of works inspired by a journey into the wacky, dreamlike reality of Salton Sea, Philippe Mayaux invites us on a pictorial drift through the neglected fringes of the American Dream. This exhibition explores our relationship with history, nature and the disillusionments of modernity, sketching the contours of a Solar Punk future and inviting us to meditate on ruins, the betrayed promises of technology and the fragility of our environment. Indeed, in this exploration of the groans of a crippled world, a ray of hope flickers, an alternative vision of a possible future, at once slightly utopian and terribly urgent.

A journey to the heart of a heterotopia. Salton Sea, California, a former party paradise turned toxic hell, serves as the starting point for our pictorial exploration. This artificial sea, born in the middle of a salt desert as the result of an industrial accident in 1905, was once the playground of Hollywood stars, then it turned into today’s post-apocalyptic landscape, where the ruins of past glory sit in a mutilated and oxidised natural environment. Philippe Mayaux sees it as a mirror of our times: a place where past, present and future overlap, revealing the absurdity of our capricious and selfish pursuits, and where the emblems of our power simply go back to being natural substances — iron, wood, sand and bone. His paintings speak to us of collapse and memory, vanity and responsibility, inviting us to contemplate the disturbing beauty of a scene in its death throes. But this is no simplistic observation of decline; in this shattered world, there are also signs of resilience, the beginnings of change, the seeds of rebirth, of a possible harmony between nature and sustainable innovation opening the path to a brighter future.

Paintings like epiphanies. The works on display do not merely represent Salton Sea; they become its epiphanies — those moments when fiction tips over into reality, when the spirit becomes food for thought, when the symbol reaches beyond its context. Each canvas is a door ajar onto a topsy-turvy world, where certainties waver and, behind the fog of future mystery, the possibility of new perspectives emerges.