(tender) creatures might appear to be the title of a story, of a children's film or, perhaps, a harmless toy. Nevertheless, this peculiar title refers to the exhibition at ARTIUM by the Australian Patricia Piccinini, an artist who may be described as the creator of fantastic tales and artificial worlds full of tenderness, which seem to be the result of laboratory experiments.

The exhibition contains works created over the last 15 years, during which time the artist has switched between sculpture, drawing, photography and videoinstallation to recreate a synthetic universe inhabited by strange animal species, trucks in the shape of babies and digital gardens. Patricia Piccinini's world is unreal, but once one enters it in order to discover its secrets and to unravel its message, we find that it very much resembles our own day-to-day reality, marked by the dizzy pace set by technological progress and by the impact of its contradictory and sometimes unpredictable consequences.

The relationship between what is natural and what is artificial is one of the key issues in the work of Patricia. Piccinini. The artist considers that the frontier between these two concepts is ever more blurred and permeable. for an urban person, something as artificial as a motorcar can become more natural than a horse, a species which, on the other hand, is the product of thousands of years of human intervention in the form of selective breeding. Halfway between technological invention and nature, the hybrid creations of Piccinini highlight this ambiguous dialogue and give rise to a deliberation upon the scope of technoculture.

Works such as Young Family, Protein Lattice, Plasticology, Helmets, and Nature's Little Helpers, allude to a controversial tangle of ethical questions surrounding biotechnological advances such as genetic manipulation, cloning, assisted reproduction or environmental control, widespread techniques that are accepted by almost everyone. Piccinini's oeuvre poses awkward questions about this issue: Where exactly are the boundaries of science? Who benefits from its discoveries? Can human beings manage to control their creations? And what about their errors?

It should not be forgotten that, in spite of tackling polemical issues, Piccinini is capable of generating a feeling of great tenderness. The weird appearance of her creatures seems to provoke a kind of repulsion and unease, but they also awaken the empathy of the spectator. This is a deliberate strategy of the artist, who states that she likes to appeal to our emotions when dealing with complex subjects in which an ethical stance is not straightforward. Many of her works centre upon the world of children whose innocent and vulnerable appearance contributes to a friendly reading of the message.

When creating her creatures, Patricia Piccinini resorts to hyperrealism in order to invite the spectator to observe the skin, wrinkles, sweat and hair of these sculptures. Besides this biotechnological bestiary, the metallic and sensual gloss of another important part of her work, which she relates to the world of motor technology, is especially noteworthy: trucks in the form of babies, a mother motorbike with her little baby motorbike, customised helmets, etc., machines that seem to want to metamorphose into human shapes.

Just like Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein, Piccinini's creatures seem to materialise the Utopian dream of human reason, always desirous of creating life in the name of progress. Just like the monster created by Doctor Frankenstein, these creatures remind us that the power of creation and the control of human beings are not infallible. However, Patricia Piccinini does not take a stance against progress. Her oeuvre does not contain apocalyptic messages or absolute truths. She simply opens the door to a debate without conclusive responses.

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