Tucked within the vaulted quiet of KRUPA in London, Æon stages an encounter with the non-human vastness of time.
Drawing from H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism, the exhibition unfurls an aesthetics of deep temporality, where the human is neither protagonist nor reliable narrator. Instead, we enter a realm where artistic form collapses chronology, and meaning is sedimented, not declared. The show features works by Justyna and Paweł Baśnik, alongside the duo Inside Job (Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus), whose practices tease the edge of the comprehensible, gesturing toward aeons as not just units of geological time but ontological states.
Justyna Baśnik’s Solastalgia series, especially Larix decidua, channels the elegiac pulse of plant life navigating extinction and memory. Her reinterpretations of medieval iconography — altarpieces where larch trees replace Christian allegory — treat botanical existence as a sacred continuum, displaced but undefeated. Fossils serve not as relics but as oracles. In Tabernaculum, a prehistoric cephalopod shell replaces the eucharist, suggesting that the divine now resides in fossilized traces of life predating even myth.
Inside Job’s post-human landscapes conjure the botanical uncanny. In Will Spread, thistle silhouettes — survivors of human disturbance — merge with the cryptic logic of the Voynich manuscript, offering vegetal forms as speculative language. The Antiya series escalates this, presenting bio-tech hybrids sprawling across industrial carcasses. Leather, metal, cotton: materials re-engineered into semi-sentient flora. These works mutate across iterations, refusing fixity, modeling survival not as resilience but as continual adaptation.
Paweł Baśnik’s canvases operate in geological time. Through pigment flows echoing rock erosion and tectonic drift, his paintings deny the gesture of the artist as much as they perform it. In In His House at R’lyeh Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming, Lovecraft’s monstrous geometry is evoked through oozing, barely-formed shapes. Here, the monstrous is not grotesque but inevitable — matter folding into its own laws, art as mineral memory.
Together, these practices abandon anthropocentrism not with didacticism, but with an eerie elegance. In Æon, temporality liquefies; identity becomes substrate. What we witness is not the end of the human, but its dispersal — into pigment, into plant, into myth and mineral. A new narrative language is germinating, not one of endings or warnings, but of emergence.
