Harnessing the generative wellspring of Stable Diffusion fueled the artist’s hybrid approach and turn back to painting, which makes Cea somewhat of a scientist/artist in the vein of the archetype advocated by Alexander von Humboldt, German explorer of the Americas. Emphasizing the physiognomy of plants versus a taxonomic approach, Humboldt longed for the artist who could produce an artwork that inscribes an objective and interconnected view of nature with their intuition. Humboldt’s ghost and that of Frederic Edwin Church, who took up the challenge, haunt the artist’s series of acrylic works on canvas. There’s more than a passing resemblance to The Heart of the Andes (1859) in Holiday in Chaco, but unlike Church’s heroics, Cea is happy to undercut the self-seriousness with a tongue-in-cheek title or the deadpan, floating 3D-printed magnets of organs applied to certain works. Instead, his paintings are not prescriptive, yet are evocative of a place in the process of forming, disappearing, and collapsing. Call it anti-heroic painting, and it has more in common with other contemporary practitioners’ work with implied landscapes, like the series Profiles in Fugitive Light by Tom McGrath, the non-existent structures by Puerto Rican artist Gamaliel Rodriguez, or even fellow Chilean artist Jorge Tacla’s enigmatic, spatial abstractions. The artificiality of landscape is further underscored by a contribution to the exhibition from Constanza Alarcón Tennen, whose 30-minute sound work of squawking birds, chirping insects, and jungle sounds sampled from geographically varied sources helps to invent a seemingly stable backdrop to the paintings and exhibition.

​

No Monsters, No Paradise marks a transitional moment for Cea, because it articulates a holistic view of his practice, and not a moment too soon. At a recent walkthrough, Cea discussed how, as a digital artist, his work has already been made redundant by AI systems, whose creativity is unbounded by an historical arc or facts. He also alluded to a way to outrun the undesirable ends of this current melding of myth and technology: the Science of Truth. It is likely an inexact science, however, because through a mix of the real and virtual, a hybridity of tools and materials, and a jump in timescales, the artist’s transtemporal allegory flourishes to reveal greater truths.