Stones displayed in the Petriverse of Pierre Jardin are reassembled in a composition that recalls artificial grottoes in 16th century French and Italian gardens, which were informed by erudite speculations about the origins of creation, in particular the formation of minerals.  These imaginative landscapes featured carvings of eroded stone and fantastic creatures, alongside concretions of limestone and stalactites, deliberately conflating nature and culture, and geologic and vegetal materials.

The background field (a shore stone in close-up) reveals an entire ecosystem where lithic glitches become little niches,clam caves and tiny tunnels burrowed by piddocks and bristle worms.  The briny stone surface provides an image of the ocean floor as the rocky womb of life;  the spinal column down the center implies the uncanny stirring of a central nervous system or primitive intelligence.

The Petriverse Grotto harbors several phantasmagoric figures with anthropomorphic features, revealing the regressive character of a geophilia replete with fantasies of petrification, the apotheosis of the desire to become stone.  Aesthetics is figured as sedimentation, a sinking feeling and stoned thinking into and about things.