Chimera

Chimera is a work by Antonio Barbieri for MaVoix, born from a visionary exploration that merges digital art, evolutionary science, and organic imagination.

At the foundation of the project lies a reflection inspired by Eldredge and Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which suggests that living species evolve through sudden leaps rather than linear continuity.
It is through this discontinuity of the visible that Chimera takes shape — a wallpaper that deconstructs the natural world, then reassembles it like a dream.

Barbieri uses 3D scanning and digital modeling to capture real elements from the environment — stems, plants, algae, petals — and merge them into complex, hybrid, synthetic structures.
Each figure within the pattern seems to be a flower, but also an anemone, a creature, a sediment, a memory.
Chimera is an impossible, surreal, speculative vegetation.

The result is an organic–artificial fresco: a pristine background overlaid with digital forms that stratify like a fossil from the future, a biological garden generated by intelligence, technology, and poetry.

Chimera is both decorative and conceptual — a visual experiment poised between nature and its reinvention.
The optical white background heightens the contrast between forms.
The plant-sculptural subjects stand out with hyper-pigmented intensity: silicate violet, algal green, deep burgundy, and translucent blue accents.
The texture appears gelatinous, alive, biomorphic.

A mural fresco that dialogues with the future of matter, with the aesthetic of bio-art, and with the transformations of the organic into the digital.