Microstructures

In the work of Alexis Allemand, the painter’s gesture is transformed and displaced. It does not act directly on the surface of the image, a direct contact reserved for the machine in the digital context, but at a prior, more fundamental level. Indeed, the artist deconstructs the capture tool, the scanner, physically imposing on it an off-program logic that opens up the image’s field of possibilities. With this diverted tool, the artist sets about scanning the sky over an extended temporality. The resulting image expresses itself at the level of its own surface, where the multiple tones of the sky intertwine with the color components of a broken-down additive synthesis, giving birth to an imposing knit of space-time, of a poetic tenor that coexists with the high technicity of the gesture. This image, taken from the series Colorfield (2018), despite the intervention carried out by the artist, remains indebted to a capture, albeit a consciously deregulated one. Its materiality remains attached to a form of pure indexicality, since no iconicity (or almost none) can be attributed to this image, whose texture responds to a rearrangement of forms on a microstructure enriched with time.

In An Autonomous Agent Choreo (2016), by Toni Mitjanit, what becomes texture is not the product of a deconstructed capture but “coded” entities that take nature as their model. The complexity reached by these autonomous agents is, without paradox, not the result of a “Cartesian” process in which calculation prevails. On the contrary, it stems from a long and uncertain process of sensitive experimentation undertaken by Toni Mitjanit, in which the cogito ergo sum is inverted. Here, the whole becomes something other than the mere accumulation of the behavior of the fundamental entities (the autonomous agents), in a work that raises the question of emergence, a notion that takes on its full meaning when it becomes problematic to explain the global behavior of a system through the analysis of its individual components.

Jean-Michel Rolland knits his digital images differently. Through algorithmic processing, he manages to assign physical properties to the different pixels of the image, whose materiality is thereby restored. The initial still, figurative image thus becomes unstable, intimately unbalanced. A subtle process of gravitational settling of the pixels takes hold in an image that is now animated. In it, increasing entropy shifts the regime of figuration, which struggles between abstraction and dreamlike landscape. At its end, this alchemical process arrives at an inverted version of the original image, obtained through a detour that generates forms of great delicacy.