Miguel Palma’s (b. 1964, Lisbon) artistic works often present the world as a model in a dream or nightmare – technically constructed and absurd. In a seemingly playful manner he examines certain aspects of artistic reality or the general human situation, although this is usually marked by a deeply sceptical and pessimistic world view.

During his artist residency in a studio with a view of Montagne Saint-Victoire, Miguel Palma, who was finding himself in the same place as Cézanne, fascinated by this subject, devised a mechanism, a reflective structure that was erected on the mountain that enabled him to reverse the viewpoint. Put up in the parc of Mudam, the installation Pays/scope (2012) transmits the image of a detail of a building located on the Plateau Saint-Esprit. The resulting images, far from offering an often fantasized objectivity, seem to hover: marked by shifting light and the distortions of the mirror, they create fleeting impressions.

His installation Autofocus (2006) initially appears to be a technical implementation of a futuristic imagination, similar to the works we know from other ages, e.g. Leonardo da Vinci. A propeller-driven rail vehicle with a video camera at its tip moves like a satellite “around” the earth in motion. The resulting picture is shown on a screen, which, as Palma phrases it, forms an analogy to Google Earth.