Vetjylien N’gyrz

Introduced as a ‘Babylonian philosopher, alchemist, herbalist, botanist, toxicologist and pharmaceutical magician’, cryptopolymath Vetjylien N’gyrz’s moniker is in fact a portmanteau of the artists’ Veit Laurent Kurz and Julien Nguyen. Using this character as a deliberately playful conceit, The Flowers of Paranoia served as an appendix to the nomadic, curatorial project Servants Order ov Ancient Psychik Youth. Better known by its acronym, ‘S.O.A.P.Y’ is a fictional band of occultists conceived by Kurz and Nguyen who have so far had two exhibitions of their own and other artist’s work; the first, also at Neue Alte Brücke in Frankfurt last November, followed by a second soon after at Vilma Gold in London. Allegedly N’gyrz is a figure of influence for this company – one that harnesses the Dark Arts for its own initiation.

For The Flowers of Paranoia the artists have fused a shared interest in mysticism, natural history and the peripherical social status of magic, to present a collaboratively written text piece and a grouping of sculptures. Around the room eight digital prints on board supposedly recount the last entries of N’gyrz’s encyclopedic Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes – actually the title of a 1597 book by the English botanist John Gerard – that, in a doomed poetic, narrates a first-person Aldous Huxley-esque account of the narcotic effects of the inhalation and ingestion of various psychedelic and psychotropic plants and funghi. Embellished with floral marginalia, illustrations of flowers and day-glo paint splatters over the runic script these fragments appear part illumi­nated manuscript, part plant morphology. But, through the author’s increasing disenchantment with the ‘real’ world, they ultimately read as a suicide note.

The lifting of the original tome’s title is not the only act of plagiarism. Contained amongst the text are three borrowed extracts: a section from the Christian pseudepigraphic text The Greek Apocalypse of Daniel; an undated quote by former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme (recalling meeting President Richard Nixon at the funeral of Georges Pompidou in 1974) and, most surprisingly, lyrics from Coldplay’s 2002 song The Scientist.

N’gyrz’s hallucinations of ‘jewel-powered gardens’ are visualized in miniature in the centre of the gallery space: four high-mounted landscapes made from terrain-prop brick and static grass, resembling a tabletop game or recreational scale model, balanced atop spindly legs fashioned from curtain rods and decorative fixtures. Ornamented with Primark-bought plastic bling, such as brooches and necklaces, long-stemmed plastic flowers and foliage sprouted from them. With an obvious nod to amateur hobbyism, the accuracy or perfection of these models seems less a concern than methodical construction. One could say their project as a whole is delivered like a kind of pulp fiction – not fully con­vincing nor meant to be.

Kurz and Nguyen’s use of fictive characterization also dispenses with factic biographical detail. This frees the artists to locate their project somewhere other than known, historical past. Perhaps this place could be a fantastical otherworld that recognizes magic over science or religion. There are stylistic flourishes that hint at Vetjylien N’gyrz and his followers existing in bygone times but also evidence that rebukes this assumption – especially within the accom­panying press texts that underpin this and the S.O.A.P.Y. shows. For example, N’gyrz was apparently ‘a pioneer in the field of cultigen, graft chimaeras and genetic engineering’ – techniques that could not have existed concurrently in any given present. In this sense, their project is somewhat parodic of artistic practices that scour cultural margins for esoterica and forgotten figures but that, arguably, leave the receiver with little more than a slightly picqued awareness.

Instead Kurz and Nguyen make use of a flattening of historical procession and an apparent appetite for the esoteric and alternative belief systems in a time of advanced technology. The Flowers of Paranoia feels authored in the vein of mythoposeia – a literary genre of backstorying found in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Simarillion (1977) or H. P. Lovecraftian mythos – in which writers have fleshed out their fictional universes. Similarly, the two artists have backtracked on their constructed fraternity and provided it with a proto-fiction. What remains curious however is why the artists chose a fantastical remit for this and the S.O.A.P.Y exhibitions. By way of conjecture the British author China Miéville has previously questioned the marginalization of fantasy literature in comparison to science fiction. While both are denigrated genres, fantasy still remains estranged while science fiction has become theoretically and aesthetically fashionable. Perhaps when more astute examples of the latter are becoming science fact, it is precisely in the alienated space of the former where Vetjylien N’gyrz can be found.