The Poison Drinkers

‘The Poison Drinkers’ is an exhibition of new works by the London-based artist Daniel Hosego. Combining Renaissance allegory with Pop Art Daniel adapts classical narratives to the age of disinformation, and traces a parallel between the imagined mythologies of the past and the make-believe world of online content today.

Daniel Hosego’s paintings and drawings take as their template the narratives of what was once considered High Culture and bring them up to date with the everyday features of 21st century life: smartphones, social media, wi-fi and pollution, consumerism and conspiracy theories. In the process, the ideals of a morally certain past become muddied by the grubbiness of late capitalism. A baroque angel descends from the Heavens in the annunciation of the Finger Lickin’ Chicken recipe to Colonel Sanders. The mythical Automaton Talos is imagined updated by AI to become Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, the next evolution in humanity (yet still obsessed with his phone). Michelangelo’s Farnese Hercules leans against a recycling bin in an industrial polluting landscape. His muscular form is much like the endeavour of recycling: an ideal debased by commercial interests. These are presented like altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts, alluding to their role as the new mythology.

Politics form a central part of the exhibition, given the role of digital media in the proliferation of disinformation in our new realities. The centrepiece of the show is a monumental drawing that reimagines Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ as a self-enclosed world vomited from Donald Trump’s mouth. It is a nightmarish orgy of monsters and smartphones, Bitcoin and slot machines, circus performance and film cameras. The Tree of Life sits at its heart transformed into an internet information tree, bearing Google apps as its fruits while its roots swallow people much as the web swallows their data. In an accompanying work, a mini Boris Johnson sits above a stack of dark money before the EU flag like a putti triumphant.

Amongst these scenes are the behaviours this new realm prompts: doomscrolling, wi-fi worship, self-image obsession, and medication in pursuit of a fictional perfection. In a painting reinterpreting Ridinger’s ‘Creation of Adam’, a female figure is enraptured by a Like that appears as divine manifestation. A Virgin is festooned with Botox needles; a Moses-like figure wields a scales like a New Commandment as dopamine tablets cascade from the Heavens. In a large drawing the Heliades, daughters turned into trees in Greek mythology, gather around a Tree of Likes. They are surrounded by digital nomads in thrall to their screens, beholden to its fruit. These are the Poison Drinkers, forever online as they gradually become part of the tree.