To look upon a Dutch Golden Age still life is to enter a contract with time. In the hyper-detailed masterworks of the seventeenth century—such as the abundant, calculated botanical arrangements of Rachel Ruysch—the glint of moisture on a plum or the silver sheen of a dead pheasant is rendered with dizzying precision. Yet, these tables laden with wealth were never just celebrations of luxury; they were exquisite traps. They operated as memento mori—visual reminders of the inevability of decay. The fish would rot, the flowers would wither, and the feast would end.

In the monumental murals and studio canvases of French artist Veks Van Hillik, these historic tropes find an eccentric, deeply contemporary reincarnation. Born in 1988 in a small, verdant village in southwest France, Van Hillik grew up obsessed with the flora and fauna surrounding him. Today, he translates that obsession into an eerie brand of pop surrealism, supercharging the dark backgrounds and architectural niches of classical art with weightless, biological chimeras that reflect our fractured relationship with the natural world.

Shaking the Historical Anchor: The Aesthetics of the Uncanny

Van Hillik’s work thrives on a visual bait-and-switch. From a distance, his large-scale murals mimic the solemnity, moody chiaroscuro, and architectural framing of historical oil paintings. He seats his subjects on sturdy, simulated stone ledges against abyssal, dark backdrops.

Upon closer inspection, however, the comforting realism of the classical tradition ruptures. The fauna he depicts are not passive specimens awaiting decay; they are active, unsettling hybrids navigating an alternative physics.

A stately heron gazes forward, but its sharp beak morphs into an iron skeleton key. A delicate butterfly flutters through the composition, entirely missing its abdomen. Elsewhere, a nautilus shell balances impossibly atop a glassy, fragile water bubble. Van Hillik subverts our first impressions, replacing the inevitable decay of the old masters with a suspended, dreamlike instability.

The Levitalizing Mystery of the Aquatic Realm

Among the menagerie of composite creatures that populate Van Hillik’s subconscious—including a tortoise-shell-backed hare and an unsettling, wide-eyed goldfish sporting fully formed arms and legs—the fish remains his supreme protagonist.

Originally taught to draw marine life by his older brother, Van Hillik’s childhood passion for fishing developed into a lifelong artistic obsession. For the artist, fish represent the ultimate bridge between the familiar and the supernatural.

The marine and aquatic world offers an almost endless variety of forms, colors, and patterns. Sometimes graceful, sometimes monstrous or grotesque, fish are almost always somewhat surreal.

– Van Hillik notes.

This biological alienation is precisely what makes their presence on dry land so potent. While humans have mapped only a little over a quarter of the earth’s sea floor, leaving the deep ocean an unsolved enigma, Van Hillik liberates these creatures from the abyss entirely. His fish do not swim, nor do they fly; instead, they exist in a state of permanent, peculiar levitation, drifting weightlessly through the air alongside suspended water droplets and floating plant stems.

Anthropomorphism and the Ecological Subtext

By replacing human subjects with animal actors, Van Hillik taps into the ancient lineage of fables and folklore. He plays deliberately with the unspoken codes of anthropomorphism—the human tendency to project our own morality, expressions, and social anxieties onto the animal kingdom.

Yet, beneath the whimsical, illustrative charm of these big-eyed creatures lies a sharper, more sobering undercurrent. By rendering the natural world as a fragile, gravity-defying theater of the absurd, an ecological subtext inevitably rises to the surface.

Van Hillik’s canvases function as secret, non-linear windows into a subconscious world where innocence and darkness share equal space. By stripping his ecosystems of gravity, he strips the viewer of their certainty. We are left looking into a beautiful, perilous dreamscape, wondering whether these levitating creatures are ascending to a higher state of being, or fleeing an environment we have disrupted beyond repair.