Victor Siret is an artist who works with embroidery on canvas, in cross stitch and half stitch, to recreate fragments of American popular culture: cartoons, soap operas, advertisements, B-movies, video games. The result are dense and disorienting compositions, as in Out In The Strip, where a turquoise sign stands against a burnt orange background and white lightning bolts streak the sky like glitches: a hypnotic, desert-like America that looks like it came straight out of a Nineties video game.

Cross stitch is not a decorative choice. In Siret’s practice, embroidery is a deliberately slow act that freezes and digests the continuous flow of digital images the artist draws from. The texture of the embroidered fabric physically mirrors that of the pixel: same grid, same principle of construction through accumulation, but at the opposite speed. Where the digital image flows, the embroidered one sediments.

His works explore domestic, public and professional spaces, the suburban home, the city, the high-rise office, as places where appeal and anxiety coexist. The America Siret depicts is not the real one but the mediated one, the one that reaches us through a screen: flat, oversaturated, familiar and unsettling at the same time. Since 2022 he has lived in Marseille, and in his canvases the French port city blends with American motifs until it becomes a feverish, dreamlike landscape populated by flattened buildings, signs and slogans.

There is irony in his works, but it is never reassuring. Rather, it produces the same feeling as when we stare at something familiar for too long, until it no longer is.