Art serves many purposes: to escape from reality, to get to know oneself better, to provoke, to heal, to denounce, to decorate, and also to question. Artist Ghali Lazrak focuses especially on the latter, appropriating symbols of the past and bringing them into new contexts to reflect on the passage of time, the importance of icons, a shared imaginary, and the evolution of society and its values. One of his latest projects, Héritage Is Dead, bridges design and fine art, resulting in a coffee table that has some important messages.

Made of glass and vintage gilded frames, this artwork “is a reflection on the conflict between modernity and tradition, showing how the artistic values of the past are often forgotten in today’s world,” Ghali explains. “Through the design of this table, I wanted to create a conversation between two time periods: the Renaissance, with its richness and detail, and today’s fast-changing world, where traditions are fading.”
Those golden frames, which not only decorate but serve a practical function (“they act as the legs of the table, lifting the glass top, while symbolically holding the whole piece together,” the artist explains), are holding a simplified and zoomed-in portrait of one of the most famous paintings in Western art history: Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (the original painting hangs proud at Firenze’s Galeria degli Uffizi to this day, over hundred years after it was painted). The Greek goddess’ face, represented in stark black, is split into three, symbolising how “art from the past fades away or gets turned into something new and disconnected from its original meaning,” Ghali explains.
This has a lot to do with John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing. The book, which later turned into a massively successful short TV series on the BBC, reflects on a lot of things surrounding art and our ways of seeing, feeling, and interpreting it in modern times, when it’s become widely accessible to almost everyone with access to books — and today, even more thanks to the Internet. Ghali’s work also relates to Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which mused on the idea that artworks lost their aura when being reproduced, so people could see the image but not really experience the artwork itself.
Ghali explains this further: “The philosophy behind Héritage Is Dead is about the decline of traditional values in modern art, where speed and technology often make us forget the importance of history. The table, as both a useful object and a work of art, becomes a space where the beauty of the past meets the fast pace of today’s world.”

