Worlds Apart is a new series of visual works that continue Aristotle Roufanis’ exploration of social isolation and urban loneliness. A meticulously crafted body of work that has been in the making since 2020, Worlds Apart shifts the artist’s focus from vast cityscapes to immersive, hyper-realist digital environments, in an attempt to explore more intimate perspectives on the experience and emotional complexity of his subject matter.
Building upon the themes of Alone Together (2016-2019), this new body of work deepens the artist’s engagement with isolation in contemporary society, revealing the psychological and social dimensions of solitude through meticulously staged virtual environments. The extreme level of detail and scale in Worlds Apart enhances the viewer’s sense of immersion, much like the large-format composite photographs of Alone Together. Yet here, rather than observing a city from a distance, the audience is drawn into fully navigable virtual worlds that exist parallel to our own. Roufanis constructs these spaces with an acute awareness of the uncanny: they are precise yet ambiguous, possible yet eerily detached.
Worlds Apart currently consists of three immersive environments — each an expansive, uninhabited natural landscape containing a single, man-made transparent structure. Within these glass enclosures, highly detailed, familiar scenes unfold, each referencing a specific experience of social isolation. These scenarios are envisioned as taking place in worlds that exist parallel to our own, an idea that lends the series its title.
In the first work, a shipping container with glass walls is crammed with beds from an orphanage dormitory. Sitting in complete isolation on the edge of a deserted coast, it seems to be waiting to be picked up, like cargo at a harbour, yet without a ship in sight. The frigid overhead lighting in the container and the claustrophobic arrangement of the beds contrast the warm tones and sheer sense of freedom conveyed by the scene unfolding around it.
A similar contrasting environment features in the second work in the series, which is set in an abandoned marble quarry. What was once a site of intense activity and production of valuable resources is now still and quiet, the marble veins exposed along the carved, staggered terraces. Standing in the middle of the scene like a theatrical set is a depressing TV room of an elderly care home, fully furnished down to a ceiling fan turning miserably above the worn-out seating and the dull glare of the TV set. A chair is placed outside the set and at a distance, signifying a detached vantage point from where one can observe but not engage with what’s happening.
A harrowing, moonlit forest is the site of the third work, which portrays the isolation experienced by victims of domestic violence. Instead of a shipping container, this work features a greenhouse set in the middle of the landscape. Inside, wonderful flowers are blooming, their intense colour in full contrast with their dark, ominous surroundings.
Worlds Apart is entirely constructed using a combination of high-end CGI technology and meticulous creative editing. Despite their digital nature, however, the works remain grounded in Aristotle Roufanis’ photographic sensibility, following the same principles of lighting, framing, and composition. The hyper-realism of these virtual landscapes is deliberately unsettling, blurring the line between the artificial and the real.
With more virtual environments currently under development, Worlds Apart has up to now been exhibited as a video installation and a series of large-scale prints; the series will ultimately take the form of fully immersive spatial installations that visitors will be able to enter, as if entering these environments in person. By inviting viewers to step inside these worlds apart from our own, Aristotle Roufanis ultimately hopes to transform the act of looking into an act of experiencing — allowing viewers to confront the fragile boundaries between solitude and connection, and perhaps coming as close as it gets to another person’s experience.
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An early version of Worlds Apart was exhibited in 2022 at 87 Gallery, a public cultural organisation and gallery in Hull, with the support of Arts Council UK. A series of limited-edition prints are to be presented for the first time at Art Rotterdam in 2025 with Contour Gallery.
Text by Kiriakos Spirou
Worlds Apart I, 2025
Worlds Apart II, 2025
Worlds Apart III, 2025
Worlds Apart V, 2025
Worlds Apart VI, 2025
