Miguel Chevalier : videomapping on the Grand Palais main façade.
Art Spring in Paris: digital art on stage
This week is marked in Paris by several art shows, opening from March 27 to 30, well in line with last year taking off (see our 2013 post).
Art Paris tops the landscape in the Grand Palais. And offers a grand stage to digital art, with a night projection of The world's origin by Miguel Chevalier on the full main façade. Inside, digital art remains quite sparse, but several galleries take the risk of presenting it in an environment more traditionally contemporary, if we can say so.
Alain Le Boucher: 12 fuites du temps. A new technology for livelier LED sculpture
The most advanced trend is presented by Lelia Mordoch gallery, which shows in front place the last work of Alain Le Boucher, 12 fuites du Temps (12 flights of Time). It's the first instantiation of the new technology he uses (with (for the geeks), WS 2811 circuits and a 2 Go (micro SD) board). The sculpture animates 288 diodes on a cycle varying around 45 seconds.
For the first time, Galerie Charlot one of the strongest support of digital was for the first time admitted in the temple. Misha Margolis, dominates the space, with its diverse small videos in diverse framings, including a writing desk showing a collection of small works connected in a larger one. We knew most of these works, but the artist has added some new declensions of the concept. The stand presents also many works of Zaven Paré with its combinations of video, sculpture and cinetic art. The video installation Lisière! by Thomas Israël, also present on the stand, is another example of video and sculpture combination (see below about Chevalier). The gallery represents also Antoine Schmitt and Anne-Sarah Le Meur.
Margolis: a new decension of his Stalinian era mail.
Less visibly digital, the works of Pascal Dombis could be made, it seems, by hand, even though they are algorithmically generated (with programming in Postscript language, with it easy ways of writing loops and its rich library of typographical fonts). That's a deliberate choice of the artist, who likes to plan on ambiguity and considers the computer only as a production tool. His works are presented by Pascal Janssens gallery, who exhibits also many works by Carlos Cruz-Diez.
Some works of Miguel Chevalier are presented by Louise Alexander gallery. For instance, the projection of graphically generated videos on a sculpture. This form of "video mapping" is now practiced by many digital artists, at least for two reasons. One is artistic: it gives flesh to otherwise rather cold and flat constructions. The other one is strategic; add an object to a video, and you get properly a "work of art", with its unicity and its standard status, important for the commercial/fiscal aspects.
PAD (Paris Art + Design) presents also new works, mainly at Priveekollektie gallery, who hosts Dominic Harris and Miguel Chevalier (definitely present everywhere). Harris makes videos of birds, digitally processed, and interactive through a presence detector which controls the sequence of image (Humming birds, and some other, all dated 2014). s. Chevalier, more here a designer, signs a Coffee table with linear digital drawings. He shows also jewelry at Minimasterpiece gallery.
Dominic Harris: Birds.
Not properly digital, but looking so at first sight, Astrid Krogh plays with nebulas of fiber optic guiding colors (Maria Wettergren gallery).
By the way, you could enjoy the Bill Viola exhibition in Grand Palais (the façade oriented towards Champs Elysées)... but you can take your time, it will be open till July 24.
A little farther in Paris, Drawing Now (At the Carreau du Temple, a recently re-opened hall "à la Baltard, Espace commines, BHV and Hotel de Ville) widens the gamut of this artitstic week. But our first (too speedy perhaps) visit did not detect any digital work.
P.B. March 26, 2014. Revised on March 27.
This article is published also by Digitalarti.
Paris ACM Siggraph, the French chapter of ACM Siggraph, worldwide non-profit organization of computer graphics.
DICCAN'S PARTNERS:
