Brightly colored mushrooms are floating in gravity-defying arrangements on a large-scale canvas: their intertwined body’s creating a vibrant biotope of form and color situated in the foreground of a expansive, lively colored backdrop.

The representation of mushrooms has become a recurring motive in the works of Val Smets, whos practice is positioned between painting, installation, sculpture, and sensory intervention. The young artist often combins her large-scale tableaus with light
installation, site-specific settings, and smell, reflecting on the artist’s deep engagement with the medium of painting through a multitude of technics, and her theoretical exploration of the position of humans towards non-human agency through the
paradigm of mycelium and fungi.
Smets’simple treatment of the canvas and the absence of stretchers in her large-scale paintings highlight the materiality of the medium while underlining the artist’s engagement with the ongoing discourse on the traditional presentation of painting,
further breaking the confines of the genre. The direct application of paint and oil sticks on the canvas without preparatory sketches speaks to the remarkable confidence of Smets’ gesture, as her fluid lines and light brushstrokes form colorful landscapes of
oversized mushrooms through seemingly abstracted forms. Her precise use of a bright, psychedelic color pallet closely relates to the mushrooms motive of her work, referencing its representation in popular culture. The intuitive combination of blues, light greens,
rose tones and yellow allows for a balanced composition that furthers the joyful mood of the pieces while inviting the viewer to pause, seduced by the richness of tones and forms.
By playing with scale and proportions Smets is repositioning the viewer as the smallest entity of the scene, evoking questions of perspective as she morphs our familiar gaze on nature. The works allow us to see the world through an ant’s perspective, highlighting
one of the smallest (and biggest) groups within our planetary ecosystem: the mushroom. The inclusion of sensory experiences such as smell further the emersif quality of her work: creating a dramatic, almost theatrical moment through sculptural extensions in to the room. Her pieces grow in the exhibition space like living organisms, an immersive, utopian garden of the future that evoke Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s proposition of the mushroom as the live form that can survive the ruins of post-capitalism.
Smets’ work titles, such as “Sublime Ecstasy” furher highlight the close connection of her artistic practice to the concept of intensive transfer relationships between natural knowledge, artistic practice, art theory, and aesthetics. Evoking the believe of a
consciousness withing all living entities, human or non-human to de-center the anthropocene world perspective towards a living reality vis-a-vis nature.
Her sujet is reflecting on the strong thematic focus on the natural realm of plants, fungi, and animals, around the 16th to 18th century, insofar as the historic reference was also interested in the material basis of fungi, inspiring numerous visual artist to
reflect on the mushroom as a prototypical sphere of natural processes of formation. Smet’s large-scale works can therefore be positioned within the tradition of an artistic reflection on current natural science, though the course of the differentiation of
scientific research in the 17th and 18th centuries, has led this relationship to change profoundly.
The thoroughgoing temporalization of natural history within the last century has led to a reconstruction of its relations to art. It is within this interdisciplinary tradition that artistic positions such as Val Smets extent natural forms like the fungi and mushrooms as an aesthetic phenomenon to now form a complementary field in art to
scientific work and thereby assume new functions in cultural self-understanding. Thinking through Merlin Sheldrake ́s “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures” Smets celebrates the incredible diversity of a lifeform
that can pop up overnight, lives inside all of us and, and balances the paradox of new life and decay. The artist’s continuing interest in fungi has led to a deep engagement with the biological categorization of the life form. The fungi belong to the domain of
eukaryotes; however, they form a “kingdom” distinct from animals and plants, which was only assigned to them in the middle of the last century; before that, being previously ascribed to the plant kingdom, both traditionally and erroneously; today, however, it is
known that they have more in common with animal organisms.
Through her visual language, Smets creates a psychedelic new interpretation of Alice in Wonderland or the setting for Anna Karenina’s budding romance during a mushroom hunt, a forest of wonder, bustling with miscellaneous representatives of mushrooms.
It is the fungi’s characteristic to live in symbiosis with other animal or plant creatures as a positive force or as a parasite, including humans, which sparked the current “renaissance” of interest. Fungi play a fundamental role in the cycle of nature and for the exchange of nutrients in the environment: they are the originators of decomposition and transformation of organic matter. However, it is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet” that truly made the mushroom a new symbol of “A Method for the New Materialism”In her publication, Tsing introduces the “Matsutake” as it “is the most valuable mushroom in the
world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?”
Tsing creates a tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, as “The Mushroom at the End of the World” follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. By following the exemplary case of one mushroom she allows the reader to “witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial
forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more”. It is this line of inquiry that so closely connects to Smet’s work, as it allows the reader or viewer to be led into fungal ecologies and forest histories to “better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction”.
Tsing highlights the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth. It is the notion of post-colonial ecologies of Tsing’s entangled world that can be found in Val Smets’ pieces: a world upside down that is growing from its ruins.