The exhibition MATIÈRE ÉCRAN relates to transversal artistic forms, between digital and tangible. The screen is shown as a history counter, a digital footprint. It reflects our identity in a mirror effect, referring to our digital self, our avatar. At a time when the relationship to the screen is omnipresent, the artists in the exhibition redefine its role and offer another point of view.
They express a vision that reflects the place of technologies in our contemporary societies, questioning the way they shape our perception of the world. By questioning the notion of reality, by creating fictions. Images inspired or taken from everyday life but having their own digital existence.
They are scanned, decomposed, overexposed, pixelated...
The works presented in the exhibition are inspired by an aesthetic directly linked to technologies, and to the application of image processing. The image is digitally decomposed, exacerbating the place of the pixel in its substance.
Manon Pretto diffracts the real to give it another impact. The work Beyond the wall on the theme of the border, is composed of two images arranged in mirror, one of which is the negative of the other. By using effects that transform the image and exacerbate its colors, it transposes reality to offer a critical distance from our territories.
The digital matter is transposed into a tangible work, in which the screen is considered as a medium. The works transform the real by visually disrupting the physical space; by staging the contrast between the inertia of the plastic composition and the moving matter on the screen, or conversely, by mimicking the luminous priorities of the screen with backlighting principles.
In his series Fragments d'écrans Dorian Rigal explores the intrinsic properties of the screen. This device decomposes the light of the screen by separating the different layers that make up the digital image. He plays with the direction of the light source, to reveal its polarizing principle. A light passes through a transparent resin bas-relief, curves and diffracts to produce an iridescent material.
The artist moves into the tangible of digital media with Le Tableau et L'écran, a series of works with integrated screens, where each painting is conceived as a digitalized object presenting a unique video content. Its electronic components are deliberately visible. They are arranged in compositions with resin casts of printed circuits; testifying to the artist's practice, at once plastic, electronic and digital Dorian Rigal uses the digital tool to offer another vision of reality through virtual representations, guided by the unpredictable discoveries of the infinite possibilities allowed by synthetic images.
The work Le Tableau et L'écran, #01 Les fleurs molles, video realized from the scan of a garden, he uses processes of captures as the photogrammetry, allowing the digitalization of objects of our daily life to give them a digital reality. Another aspect of the exhibition is the return to the essence of the principle of diffusion of the screen, through the revelation of the image by light.
Dorian Rigal's series Positif lumineux, made from the negative of an image in backlit form, is designed to be lit briefly, like a visual flash. Its format, close to that of a cell phone, refers us directly to our relationship with the screen. Here the image is perennial although having a furtive character.
Manon Pretto uses the same principle with the backlit installation Un gant sur la lune, based on a concept of fictional archaeology. This photograph of an everyday object stages the future relics of the present, disturbing the temporality of the object looked at. With this work she blurs the tracks on the veracity of the images, entering in echo with the consumption that we have of it, at the time of the 'Fake' where everything can be manufactured.
The artist also questions the notion of imprint and digital memory, in her series Sample extracted from the installation Under the ground; arranged on the ground and composed of printed digital works, screens and debris ... as the remnant of a digital space in ruins. Presented in the exhibition, the Sample series is the sample, a transposition of the stone into a pixelated matter, a digital artifact.
This idea of freezing a digital material into a plastic work is present in Bastien Cuenot's work Color Blind, for which he uses a traditional medium to reproduce a digital effect. This airbrush painting with intense colors represents heat zones in the sky, captured by the artist via a thermal camera connected to an iPhone. Made by hand, the gesture of the artist still belongs to him, but punctually his vision is delegated to the sensor of an Iphone.
His approach tends to extract digital forms to embody them in the physical world. He thus takes a critical look at contemporary technologies, using them as raw material for his artistic practice.
His series Impression, Rising Sun, refers to the emblematic traces of the passage of the atomic bomb of Hiroshima, whose thermal radiation made visible the shadows of the victims carried on the ground. They are engraved on a screen with a pulsed laser, giving birth to a reminiscence of the past in this ghostly image that also refers to our nuclear future.
To seize this screen material whose substance is digital... Could it be a will to freeze time and the memory of a world that lacks it?
Press Release (FR)
