Heaven sent
Ceysson & Bénétière Tokyo is pleased to present Heaven Sent, the first solo exhibition in Japan by American artist Rachael Tarravechia.
In Heaven Sent, Tarravechia invites viewers into a dreamlike world that shifts between the familiar and the fantastical. She transforms the suburban home, a symbol of comfort, into a surreal stage where memory, fantasy, and emotion collide. Drawing inspiration from horror films, anime, video games, and mid-century design, she reimagines domestic spaces as sites of psychological transformation.
The series began through virtual wanderings. Tarravechia explored suburban homes in Reno, Nevada, through Zillow listings, drifting through digital tours like a quiet observer. These online interiors became the foundation for her collaged paintings, layered with vintage magazine pages, travel photos, and fragments from fantasy games. The result is a world that feels both nostalgic and unsettling.
Worldbuilding lies at the core of Tarravechia’s practice. Growing up with three brothers made her sensitive to the subtle ways gender shapes experience, a tension that continues to inform her work. Video games such as Final Fantasy, Okami, and Kingdom Hearts offered early forms of escape and transformation. Their influence appears throughout her paintings in the form of floating weapons, icons, and symbols of empowerment.
The works in Heaven Sent move between the sacred and the profane. In Un Petit Coup, a 1980s bathroom glows with sunset light as reflections from disco balls scatter across the tiles and an oyster offers its pearl, a moment of stillness before unease sets in. Suitehearts presents a heart-shaped bed that has become an iron maiden, where two jeweled skeletons, echoing Catholic relics, embrace as flames consume the room.
As the house grows increasingly disorienting, the spaces evolve into dreamlike arenas of transformation. In Carbonated Blood, a vampiric coffin hovers within a tiled high school bathroom. Transformation Sequence merges funerary and beauty rituals, depicting a jewel-encrusted coffin mid Sailor Moon metamorphosis, surrounded by butterflies. The exhibition culminates in One Winged Angel, a climactic "boss battle" where gothic cathedral architecture merges with video game imagery. Stained glass windows shimmer with poker chips, hearts, and spades, while a pipe organ recalls Final Fantasy VII and Puella Magi Madoka Magica.
Materially, Tarravechia’s paintings are as precise as they are opulent. Rhinestones, pearls, lace, and chains adorn the surfaces, yet every element is meticulously arranged. Beneath the vivid color and gleaming texture lies a tension between control and excess, reflecting the artist’s ongoing exploration of the body, desire, and emotional restraint.
In Heaven Sent, the viewer becomes a player moving through a labyrinth of transformation. Tarravechia’s world, suspended between fantasy and fear, asks what it means to inhabit spaces, both real and imagined, that are beautiful, haunted, and profoundly human.
