Andrea Marcellier presenting at the inaugural edition of Paraíso Art Fair

14 Septembre 2026 Andrea Marcellier

«So i bought a little city, ain’t she pretty*»

I was wondering why I never received any outspoken negative critique. I once typed into chatgpt and asked it to roast my project application. “You spent two years researching on chickens” it said “and fantasised about adopting a chicken, and yet you never touched a chicken.” – touché I answered.

So i bought a little city, ain’t she pretty

I think what I’m doing here is purposing the housing of a surveillance camera, anti-explosive anti-radiation outdoor proof-everything-everything-proof and using it as an empty vessel. That I guess is the utopian side of things.

Adorning it with flowers comes from grief, from the heartbreak of our little era where so much is lost and so much more will be.

Using a surveillance camera as a vase is seductive, looking back at oneself in the stare of late fascism, lured into daydream. Trying to bring beauty where beauty doesn’t belong, in a display of abundance. While knowing for myself that for now, I am no threat to surveillance capitalism, and I wouldn’t be stopped from where I’m going to where I’m going. I who have nothing to hide.

So i bought a little city, ain’t she pretty

My waters don’t do waves it seems, as if in a pond. I’m drawing flowers on the visor’s screen while hating hippies, and circus freaks, and rick owens. I’m sober, vegan or quite, I’m gluten free, I will live to a hundred years old during the ten years we have left.

So i bought a little city, ain’t she pretty

The first staged scene I made with flowers, was when throwing roses onto my grandfather’s grave, (as one does) who was the first in the family vault that was meant to hold about ten coffins, and the roses would burst apart the moment they hit the lacquered wooden floor. It’s strange how the beauty of an intention dissolves its result. It’s lovely. Tastes like Oscar Wilde’s alleged last words “one of us had to go, me or the wallpaper.” Flowers have had an importance in my work ever since.

So i bought a little city, ain’t she pretty

Again, strikes me that I never got negative critique on my work. Let me tell you what, I was so surprised to come across a painting exhibition I actually liked at TR the other day. Although I thought at the first glance “these paintings are so fucking ugly” eventually I came closer and realised they were entry to a spirit world. What looked from the grand picture as small gimmicky gestures of the hand, were in fact characters of an imaginary world. Little ghosts holding weapons. Looking as if they would be returning from or heading towards a battlefield of an immaterial nature. Ghosts remain undamaged that’s one thing. Or maybe they were parading who knows? I love how the surface of the paintings exists in its own crossroads of time and space irrespective of ours. Seaming to say “what’s so funny?” I thought how nice that the canvas made me hate it in the first place, how much it really didn’t need me.

*Donald Barthelme, ‘I Bought a Little City’, published in the print edition of The New Yorker, November 11, 1974.

Andrea Marcellier

Andrea Marcellier (b.1995, Paris) is a French-Venezuelan artist based in Paris. Her works explore the gesture as a site of intimacy, what can and cannot be touched. Flowers are used for vandalism, ornate weapons dress a piece of meat. The tools of oppression are adorned until they become beautiful, and beauty operates as a lure to unbury collective silences and desires. The work traces where taming and tenderness share a single threshold. Andrea Marcellier studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and holds a degree in psychology. She has shown internationally in New York, Hangzhou, and Berlin, and with galleries such as DS Galerie (Paris) and Belmacz (London). She was a resident at the Villa Belleville, Paris.