RED Planet Vol.3 Xavier Duffaut

ArtContest and the Michèle Schoonjans Gallery are delighted to invite you to discover the installation “RED Planet Vol.3”, created by Belgian artist Xavier Duffaut, the 2024 winner.
 

An active member of ArtContest since 2007, Michèle Schoonjans is dedicating her gallery’s storefront window to ArtContest during the summer of 2026.
 

With ‘RED Planet Experience Vol. 3’, the artist transports us into an immersive experience at the heart of a reimagined Mars: a post-apocalyptic landscape where the dream of space exploration clashes with the reality of contemporary consumerism. Through a series of works blending religious iconography, advertising aesthetics and the entertainment industry, the installation questions the commodification of utopia and corporate control over our collective imaginations. 
 

The project is based on a radical decontextualisation: everyday urban objects — scooters, smart bins, electric vehicle charging points — are transplanted onto the Martian landscape. These artefacts of the ‘smart city’ appear here as totems of our hyper-modernity, embodying a race for technological innovation, where planned obsolescence and the volatility of private services dictate the evolution of our visual landscape. By redesigning these industrial objects, often unloved or vandalised, the artist attempts to immortalise them. With humour, he transforms urban mobility infrastructure and waste into precious relics, elevating the temporary to create a monument to memory. 
 

This monumental dimension takes on a sacred quality, for example in the work “Push me down” (2025), where the connected bin stands like a monolith, an object of worship or a funerary monument. Further on, the composition of e-Trinity (2024–2026) subverts Christian iconography: a Tesla charging station, flanked by two scooters, evokes the structure of a triptych altarpiece, in which astroculture and new technologies appear to us as new forms of religious belief.

 

Finally, the exhibition grounds its narrative in raw social reality. The presence on the floor of nitrous oxide canisters — waste collected from public spaces — adds a touch of tragicomic mystery. Between the anti-heroic connotations of deflated balloons and the symbolic violence of exclusion, the work casts a disenchanted gaze upon the city. “RED Planet Experience” thus reveals the deep disconnect between the high-tech smoothing of our functionalist environments and the misery they seek to conceal. A vision that is both amusing and nightmarish, where the future bears a strange resemblance to a present we no longer wish to see.