We imagine them frozen with Victorian specimen pins, or fluttering dreamlike over flowers. But the Morpho butterfly is a scavenger, an eater of the dead. It feeds on carcasses and fungi, spreading the spores of mushrooms across the jungle, as integral to decay and death as to pollination. And then there is the child and the digital and the sweep of posthumanity erasing the forest forever.

So the painter said: "In the dream where I was dead, I saw a child stained iridescent. Photonic nanostructures blurred its lips, and its mouth was full of wings. Here a jungle of wires devoured the last psychopomps, and among towers of stolen carbon rods, our childs’ eyes were the blue of biomimetic currency."

The paintings of MANDEM's "Medical Trials of the Saints" series swear allegiance to classical painting, using Old Master techniques to re-imagine religious and mythical memes from art history in a posthuman context.