Soft Systems

(b. 1985, Liverpool, UK) is a contemporary artist who predominantly works in painting and drawing. Combining various paint mediums with meticulous airbrush techniques, Boagey’s practice revolves around enticing, succulent, fleshy, sometimes erotic and occasionally perverse subject matter. Often using nature, particularly mushrooms, as both motif and metaphor, his works examine human behaviour and our shifting social, psychological and spiritual relationships with one another and the world around us.Executed with great precision, his paintings draw upon theology, mythology, poetry, folklore and the occult, layering historical and symbolic references with imagery taken from contemporary visual culture. By placing ancient narratives alongside the aesthetics of the digital age, Boagey explores the increasingly blurred boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the physical and the virtual, the sacred and the profane. His compositions are deliberately dense and associative, inviting viewers to navigate a network of symbols rather than a fixed narrative.At the core of his practice is an interest in how technological systems increasingly shape perception, identity and belief. Rather than treating technology as separate from nature, Boagey considers it an extension of humanity’s evolutionary impulse, questioning how digital environments, algorithms and mediated experiences continue to redefine our cognitive relationship with the earth, with each other and with ourselves.Boagey currently lives and works in London, United Kingdom. He received his BA from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, in 2008.