Jardins d’Été is composed of a series of videos of flowers in full bloom, filmed by Quayola at night. These flowers, swaying gently in the wind and highlighted by a spotlight, look almost as though they are dancing and emerging from the darkness. Their shifting hues — pinks, blues, and greens — interrupt the black backdrop, and become the focal point of this digital painting.

Jardins d'Été is heavily influenced by Monet’s Water Lillies (1920-26), displayed in the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris since 1927. Quayola deconstructs these venerated images, deeply ingrained in the cultural memory of the public. The artist mimics the scale of Monet’s Water Lillies in Jardin d’Été, which, when presented as a physical installation, is screened as a multichannel installation at human scale. Here, Quayola calls upon the Impressionist desire to fully immerse the viewer in the memory of a landscape.

In Jardins d'Été, Quayola focuses on the notions of the ‘opposing forces’, blending ideas of ‘real’ and ‘digital’, representation and abstraction, memory and remembrance, and nature and technology. He creates a junction between natural landscapes and digital landscapes, highlighting humanity’s shifting perception of reality as a result of advancing technology. Quayola questions how to represent contemporary natural landscapes, using advanced technological apparatuses to pursue a methodical observation of natural patterns, and brings to light the connection between the senses, memory, and the visual stimuli of technology. These observations are translated into computational paintings, generated by the analysis of ultra-high-definition paintings, and are transfigured into semi-static digital paintings. Ultimately, Quayola explores the way in which human perception has mutated viewing natural landscapes due to advancing technology. Quayola’s landscapes are rooted in the experience of place; they may verge towards abstraction, but they never fully renounce form. The trees, flowers, and plants depicted in his landscapes remain suspended between the original physicality of the world and the possible solutions offered by technologies. Machine vision appears as little more than a pretext to probe human vision, assessing its power to discriminate amidst the contemporary media chaos.