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Pascal Dombis：THE END OF ART IS NOT THE END – 2024 Solo Exhibition
London·Mayfair
Bluerider ART London·Mayfair is pleased to announce the new solo show of our representing French artist "Pascal Dombis：THE END OF ART IS NOT THE END" -2024 Solo Exhibition. Opening on 6th June, 2024, Pascal Dombis's first solo exhibition in UK offers an opportunity to explore a protean and critical oeuvre that engages with the universal notion of time through the use of digital flows as the raw material of his work.
Pascal Dombis (France, b.1965), a Paris-based visual artist who focuses as much on language as on perception. He is noted for his excessive use of simple algorithmic rules. It was in the early 90s, while finishing his studies in Boston, that he encountered digital artistic tools, prompting a transition from painting to algorithms upon returning to France. Since then, he has created environments marked by excess, repetition and the unpredictability of technological processes, in which he aims to engage the viewers by questioning perception in relation to space, time and language. He develops multi-referential works which play with spatial environments and promote multiple interpretations. Recent exhibitions include Artists & Robots at the Grand Palais in Paris (2018), Cybernetic Consciousness at Itaú cultural in São Paulo (2017) and the Venice Biennale (2013). In 2020, he achieved the creation of a permanent public artwork, Double Connection, nearly one hundred metres long in the centre of Shanghai. In 2022, he got a monographic exhibition Post-Digital at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sorocaba in Brazil.
monographic exhibition Post-Digital at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sorocaba in Brazil
Large-scale installation ‘Double Connection’
Text(e)~Fil(e)s (2010-2015) at Cité de la Mode et du Design, Paris
Instituto Itaú Cultural, Brazil Post-Digital Mirror , @Noise, 2013 55th Venice Biennale of Art
Our era is inevitably associated with speed. The speed of information flow and the proliferation of images, amplified by digital tools associated with artificial intelligence over the past decade. Originally tools for knowledge, the internet, its browsers and associated social networks, have now become bases for propaganda in service of a globalised economy and thought. Pascal Dombis is certainly one of the French visual artists who, since the mid-90s, has best perceived the importance of these post-digital mutations.
In the early 1990s, Dombis, completing his studies in Boston, discovered the possibilities offered by computer tools for artistic creation. Upon returning to France, he transitioned from painting to algorithmic practice. He was part of the fractalist group but distanced himself to pursue his desire to experiment beyond the fractal theme. Since then, the artist has employed excessive repetitions to create geometric or typographic forms through mural digital frescoes, lenticular works, and video installations. Starting from a simple visual form, Dombis develops his works using algorithms to generate extreme proliferation, resulting in effects that are both complex and unexpected.
Languages, texts and words are living organism who grew, proliferated, are mutating and ultimately will die. Writing was invented several thousand years ago, and developed considerably in the last couple centuries; its expansion has always been related to technology development, from papyrus invention, Gutenberg printing press until today’s digital tools. For Pascal Dombis, it is obvious that the actual ultra-fast and out-of-control digital technology expansion (AI, Bots, social networks …) is an immediate threat to written texts and words and will soon make them obsolete. Yes, texts are most essential in Pascal Dombis’s artistic experimentations. His practice is influenced by the American writer William S. Burroughs’ s experimental writings and his use of the random factor as a creative process. Especially the famous Cut-Up technique developed by artist Brion Gysin and Burroughs in the 1960’s Paris. By destructuring texts in a random non-linear way, Cut-Up creates a new language which is very relational for today’s digital and technological universes.
William Burroughs / Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, 1965
Highlight in “Pascal Dombis: THE END OF ART IS NOT THE END“ -2024 Solo Exhibition is an interactive 3 metres long wall installation "THE END OF ART IS NOT THE END", part of a series of pieces among the most iconic in Pascal Dombis' work. This new piece questions the issue of the multiple "ends of ..." that characterises our current times: the end of world, the end of man, the end of civilization, the end of politics, the end of history and, of course, the end of art. The international narrative is written on Google’s servers, which Pascal Dombis scans while repeating his image searches. With a few keywords on "ends of ...", he obtains large quantities of visuals, more than 20,000 images for that piece. This constitutes the database material. He assembles these icons of our times next to each other as well as above each other, obtaining a texture whose depth confers a certain pictorial quality. To decipher them one by one, you need to be equipped with a lenticular sheet to draw them out of the invisible. Thus, the gaze must be accompanied by the gesture required to focus, as in photography. Consequently, there are as many stories as there are members of the public who determine, by moving around, the montage of the image. And here, the cinema – the art of time par excellence – comes to mind. The sentence that can be made out on the surface of the installation comes from an aphorism of the painter of Radical Painting, Ad Reinhardt, «The End of Art is not the End».1。
1 Excerpt from “Art-as-Art Dogma, Part III," ARTnews (New York), March 1965.
The exhibition also includes several new works, all of which use lenticular material. Since the 2000s, Dombis has been using it to imprint his compositions, creating the illusion of movement from uninterrupted flows of information. Additionally, conducive to an acceleration of visual accidents, lenticular filtering through light layers images and texts in an unexpected manner, providing visual depth to the work. Through this augmented reality artifice, he encourages the viewer to move around the artwork, questioning possible perspectives and invoking chance and blur in this sensory experience. While he defends himself from adopting Op Art's recipes, we can find this visual instability through optical effects developed in the works of artists such as Sobrino, Le Parc, or Morellet. However, whereas such artists from the 1960s indirectly critique their society, Pascal Dombis questions the very nature of texts and images and how we perceive them in the face of their uncontrollable proliferation.
Works in the exhibition such as U.T.O.P.I.A or Time Cage question the future evolution of the written words, whether letters in U.T.O.P.I.A are gradually melting, or characters in Time Cage are transforming into bars. As a whistleblower, the artist in society questions the structural changes that accompany it. Our future, like the memory of our past, depends on it. Initiated by a simple algorithmic premise or by a looped query in a search engine as a creative process, Pascal Dombis' work is an incessant quest. He develops a body of work imbued with the notion of time, of all times. Time that stretches like an infinite curve, time that accelerates in phase with the calculating machine, elastic time that defies physics and expands to occupy the space of the fourth dimension.
The exhibition“Pascal Dombis: THE END OF ART IS NOT THE END“ is a proposition of Pascal Dombis' experiments through which he captures the signs of an impending collapse by scrutinising the excessive proliferation of sequences that he transposes into his digital collages, giving them, through an abyssal structural density, an echo of their own downfall.
“Everything has always already starting and everything is always coming to an end” – Jean Luc Nancy & Federico Ferrari, La fin des fins, 2018
“Pascal Dombis: THE END OF ART IS NOT THE END“ -2024 Solo Exhibition
Press Preview:
Thursday, 6th June, 2024 15:00-18:30 (artist will be present)
Opening Reception:
Thursday, 6th June, 2024 （artist will be present)
Collector Preview: 18:30-20:30 (by invitation)
Collector Preview: 18:30-20:30 (by invitation)
Open to public:
19:30-20:30
Exhibition Date: 6th June, 2024 - 25th August, 2024
Bluerider ART London·Mayfair
47 Albemarle St, London, W1S 4JW
Daily, 10:00-18:00
info.uk@blueriderart.com
T：+44 20 3903 7827
Works
Pascal Dombis
(Frence, b. 1965)
Pascal Dombis (France, b.1965), a Paris-based visual artist who focuses as much on language as on perception. He is noted for his excessive use of simple algorithmic rules. It was in the early 90s, while finishing his studies in Boston, that he encountered digital artistic tools, prompting a transition from painting to algorithms upon returning to France. Since then, he has created environments marked by excess, repetition and the unpredictability of technological processes, in which he aims to engage the viewers by questioning perception in relation to space, time and language. He develops multi-referential works which play with spatial environments and promote multiple interpretations. Recent exhibitions include Artists & Robots at the Grand Palais in Paris (2018), Cybernetic Consciousness at Itaú cultural in São Paulo (2017) and the Venice Biennale (2013). In 2020, he achieved the creation of a permanent public artwork, Double Connection, nearly one hundred metres long in the centre of Shanghai. In 2022, he got a monographic exhibition Post-Digital at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sorocaba in Brazil.
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