Since 2009, Laurent Grasso has developed his ongoing series Studies into the Past which fuse apparently canonical history paintings with futuristic and surreal phenomena derived from the artist’s film practice. Grasso’s paintings in the style from a bygone era incorporate imagery from his films, creating a seemingly realistic depiction of an event that never occurred. 

In the case of this work, a large cloud depicted in the artist’s 2022 film, Anima, hovers close to the ground in an early Flemish urban perspectival landscape. The painting, intentionally undated, fuses perceptions of time and reality, creating, as the artist states, a “false historical memory.”