PIERS GREVILLE: BREAKFAST AT BERGHAIN

There’s a moment that exists only in the club

It’s sometime after midnight, usually sometime before sunrise, when the night feels infinite. Time loses its meaning, music transcends genre, bodies dissolve into one another. On either side of this moment lies chaos, uncertainty, anxiety.

Yet for a fleeting second our fears and disquiet, our concern around war, environmental collapse, the existential anguishes that pervade us, cease to exist. 

But it’s an illusion. Step outside, on either side of the moment, and the air is again thick with chaos, uncertainty and anxiety.

In Breakfast at Berghain, Melbourne artist Piers Greville turns that momentary illusion into an investigation by turning his gaze skyward. What he’s really exploring is that threshold between collective escapism and the turmoil we’re trying to forget. 

As we glance into the atmosphere, where clouds behave like mirrors, we’re confronted with reflections not just of light but of the unease of our times. Explosions mistaken for sunsets or sunsets mistaken for explosions? The magic of the sublime is that it hovers precisely between beauty and terror, pain and pleasure, resting again in one exact moment.

This search for catharsis and clarity amid chaos is borne out in Greville’s process, negotiating between the digital and the analogue. Some works are built on collage, algorithmic sketches from fragments of online detritus, others entirely painted by hand, an attempt to inject human uncertainty and contrast it with precision. 

The result is a conversation between the world as it’s fed to us, and the world as it feels when you stop and look up. Which is which?

There’s another art-historical investigation at work too. Greville recasts canonical images: Delacroix’s The Barque of Dante and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, to probe how we can sanitise catastrophe. In his reinterpretation of The Barque of Dante, crosses layered over the surface mimic the framing of a camera lens, collapsing a dystopian Romanticist vision of a journey into hell into surveillance imagery.

Another piece isolates a single, supposedly hopeful corner of The Raft of the Medusa, cutting out the bodies that make the scene so tragic. It’s an act of omission that feels uncomfortably contemporary: a critique of how easily we crop horror out of the picture, and how easy, and sometimes necessary it can be for us to leave the dread of the world behind, if just for a moment.

If Breakfast at Berghain feels at once euphoric and uneasy, it’s because that’s where we live now: suspended between the club and the crisis, looking up at clouds that might just be smoke.