Steel and Soil: Toward an Ecological Aesthetic
Rewilding Materials and the Post-Industrial Sublime
In the landscape of contemporary art, materials have become more than inert substances. They are active agents carrying layered stories about extraction, industry, and ecological transformation. This sensibility is powerfully present in Sterling Ruby’s recent exhibition in Gstaad, where monumental sculptures and ceramics evoke the uneasy marriage of decay and growth. Ruby’s forms often look as if they were excavated from a future archaeological site, their rusted surfaces suggesting both corrosion and fertility. They remind us that the remnants of industrial culture can hold the seeds of something living.
Rick Owens’ retrospective in Paris advances this conversation by situating industrial materials within a context of design and sculpture. Owens is best known for his fashion work, but here he extends his interest in material hybridity to large-scale objects that merge polished metal with organic contours. The result is an aesthetic that feels both ancient and futuristic, as if the boundary between artifact and prototype has dissolved.
This approach reflects a broader impulse among artists to recast industrial residues as sites of possibility rather than symbols of collapse. The post-industrial sublime, a sensibility that finds beauty in entropy, is no longer just a theoretical concept. It is a practical method for reimagining how we relate to the material legacies of extraction and production.
These practices also align with the SUPERWRX philosophy of the Syntho-Organic Sublime, an idea that challenges the binary between artificial and natural systems. By treating corrosion as a creative force and decay as a form of renewal, artists like Ruby and Owens propose that nothing is ever truly inert. Every material bears witness to the cycles of consumption and regeneration that define our era.
There is something quietly hopeful in this outlook. It suggests that even the most depleted landscapes and discarded objects can be reanimated through attention and imagination. As climate emergencies accelerate, this attitude becomes not just aesthetically relevant but ethically urgent. It raises questions about how we might learn to see industrial remnants not as failures but as provisional stages in longer stories of transformation.
For audiences, these works offer a chance to consider whether renewal can emerge from decline, and whether beauty might reside in the places we once abandoned. In a culture obsessed with perpetual novelty, this commitment to rewilding the past feels both radical and necessary.
