_EN
Rita Süveges’s paintings deal with the everyday frameworks within which we interpret our knowledge of space, the cosmos, and the planet Earth. In the Pet Planets series, she presents inflatable toy planets manufactured for decorative purposes which she borrowed from shoddy product photographs used by Chinese webshops. The planets almost stretch the frame, and because of the way in which the work is composed, we cannot initially decide whether we are looking at a depiction of the earth, Mars, the sun, and the moon or merely small-scale plastic versions of them. The work focuses on the intriguing process by which the large body of scientific knowledge gleaned thanks to technological developments and their visual imprints (such as Blue Marble, the first colour photograph of earth from space, dating from 1972), the world around us is objectified. Is it really true that scientific discoveries and procedures enable us to fathom scales which were previously incomprehensible, for instance the dimensions of space? The paintings suggest that the answer lies in the illusion itself: anyone can have a toy planet in their home, and this toy will scale down the universe for them.