Dew Kim & Filippo Cegani

Ecstasy Protocol

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Ecstasy Protocol, a two-person exhibition featuring the works of artists Dew Kim and Filippo Cegani. In Ecstasy Protocol, the two artists delve into the fractured afterlife of Christian iconography in the post-digital age. Far from nostalgia or shock for its own sake, the exhibition interrogates what endures of a once-dominant visual and moral language, now commodified, destabilized, yet eerily persistent.

September 10th - October 4th, 2025

555 Greenwich Street, New York City

In a cultural landscape where sacred imagery is more likely to surface as an emoji, meme, or K-Pop stage design than in a church or chapel, Kim and Cegani trace the migration of the divine into the digital unconscious. They ask: “What becomes of symbols when martyrdom, grace, sacrifice, and ecstasy are stripped of their spiritual grounding and repurposed within the spectacle economy of late capitalism?”

Filippo Cegani’s paintings reframe classical religious figures in high-gloss, hyperreal surfaces, created through layered brushwork and airbrush. Saints and martyrs appear not as objects of veneration, but as sites of inquiry—diagnostic portraits that expose how sincerity becomes aesthetic, and the sacred becomes stylized. Blending Renaissance forms with digital artifacts, Cegani probes the erosion of sanctity through replication, reproduction, and meme logic. His work lingers in the space between the devotional and the disposable, where masculinity, vulnerability, and identity flicker in flesh and illusion.

Dew Kim approaches similar questions through sculpture, performance, and installation, rooted in queer experience, Christian rituals, and the aesthetics of transgression. His materials—iron, silicone, jesmonite—evoke both reliquary and restraint. In Kim’s world, the martyrium becomes a site of erotic defiance: submission not as surrender, but as authorship. Religious symbols morph into queer totems, merging pain with pleasure, devotion with desire. The altar becomes a stage, the body a medium through which belief is both reclaimed and rewritten.

At the heart of Kim’s work is a question of permission: who is allowed to feel ecstasy, and under what terms? Through ritual and spectacle, his sculptures assert that the sacred is not lost, but rerouted—channeled through performance, kink, fandom, and digital mediation.

Together, Kim and Cegani present a haunting vision of how contemporary visual culture metabolizes religious legacy. Today, ecstasy, pain, and sacrifice are not suppressed—they are everywhere, repackaged as content, drifting across screens, drained of context. Ecstasy Protocol doesn’t ask for reverence but demands a reckoning. Through their distinct yet intersecting practices, Kim and Cegani peel back the gloss of the digital present to reveal what still pulses beneath: longing, myth, ritual, and the enduring human need to make meaning from suffering—and from joy.