2025, Oil on canvas, 122 x 92cm
The original painting is sold, private collection, Australia.
Limited edition prints & artist proofs are available, please inquire.
Infinite Reach (2025) imagines a world in which the boundaries between nature, technology and human ambition have become increasingly uncertain. A tiger hurtles through space beside a rocket, transforming an image of technological progress into something instinctive, dangerous and strangely beautiful.
The painting responds to a moment shaped simultaneously by war and extraordinary technological acceleration. Space travel has again become a symbol of human ambition through figures such as Elon Musk, while artificial intelligence and robotics increasingly challenge ideas of what is uniquely human. Against this, Rea places the tiger: flesh, instinct and millions of years of evolution confronting machines capable of carrying us beyond the Earth.
There is an echo of Salvador Dalí’s 1944 Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Waking, where airborne tigers erupt into an impossible dreamscape. In Rea’s painting, that surreal collision is projected into the technological age: the animal no longer inhabits a dream, but appears to chase humanity into its own imagined future.
Infinite Reach also develops imagery from Rea’s 2018 painting High Hopes, in which a tiger pursues a missile above the Earth. Tim Baker later discussed the work in The Surfer’s Journal feature Tiger Style, describing Rea’s wider practice through the idea of the sublime: the uneasy point where beauty and fear coexist.
At its centre is a simple tension: how far can humanity reach before progress begins to separate us from the natural world that made us?