Tim Irani is one of the bridges between virtual reality and our own. In fact, he even states that his art production is the tangible representation of virtual objects. Irani wants to question our obsession with digital products that are supposed to optimize our life experience. In their digital version, always malleable, they seem useful and easy to handle, but once transformed into a physical object, one realizes their simplicity, their plastic absurdity, and their upcoming obsolescence. Irani’s creative process forces us to question what we consider real, as well as to blur the line between digital and physical products. The three sculptures, Dancing Pine, Seven Moons over the Sun, and The Rise of Other Suns (2021), are both sculptures and paintings, or what Irani calls “structural paintings”. If they could have gone unnoticed in a video game or in another digital dimension, in our virtual world, they seem strange and incongruous, impossible to link with any element of our nature. It is the virtual that intrudes into the plastic art.
