Landscape and portrait studies created within video games, landscapes of ruins collected on the internet, amalgamated and reconstructed in photogrammetry 1 , 3D digitization of cliffs, virtual images… Thibault Brunet (born in 1982) likes to blur the boundaries between drawing, painting, sculpture and photography.
Master of "the dilution of the real in the virtual and of photography in the synthetic image" 2 , the artist invited to the Hors Pistes Festival of the Centre Pompidou last winter returns to the Binome Gallery with his portraits of clouds modeled in 3D and a funny collection of gas stations taken from Google Earth.
Entitled Typology of the Virtual , this series, begun in 2004, stems from a vast program of repurposing modeled images that make up the inexhaustible landscape of Google Earth. Digitally "re-drawn" and decontextualized by the use of a blank, neutral background, these images of gas stations floating in a non-space function as symbolic motifs that can evoke our consumerist world in decline. Recurring motifs in 20th - century painting, photography, and film, they also refer to a whole branch of art history. Indeed, Thibault Brunet likes to infiltrate… particularly video games (see his Minecraft Explorer series launched in 2021 in partnership with scientists) or virtual reality games ( Black Box , 2018). Created from videos found on YouTube and then modeled in 3D, this series shows the “deadly skeletons of concrete and rubble” of Damascus and Aleppo, resembling decaying virtual models or video game sets. Disturbing landscapes of ruins, as real as they are inconsistent… “Thibault Brunet enters a world where the lines between truth, falsehood, and plausibility seem blurred. […] Derealization and fiction intrude upon the documentary. The ruins are timeless and utterly dehumanized; they challenge us to distinguish what is real from what is fabricated. […] The software’s ‘black box’ encodes reality into numerical data and arranges the ruins […] in the form of a model-world, halfway between a video game and a museum display,” reads his website about this captivating and moving series.
An “algorithmic aesthetic”
Cultivating this gamer 's perspective , Thibault Brunet develops a unique "algorithmic aesthetic." In 3600 Seconds of Light , a series begun in 2022, he "captures the ephemeral beauty of clouds using a virtual space created within a video game": on a server normally used by game designers, he acquired three-dimensional cloud models before staging them within a game engine to capture their chromatic metamorphoses under the effect of a virtual sunrise and sunset cycle… Blurring the line between painting and photography, these improbable three-dimensional cumulus clouds floating on monochrome backgrounds refer, once again, to a whole iconographic substratum ranging from medieval skies to digital art, by way of Correggio, Jacob van Ruisdael, John Constable, Boudin, and Magritte. It is in this vein, but without a paintbrush or optical camera, that Thibault Brunet continues his exploration of the "forms emerging from our dematerialized world" 4 through new virtual spaces. These are so many "(non)-places where paradoxical images emerge, at once precise and shrouded in mystery." With Thibault Brunet's collection of clouds, "both simulacra and artifacts," "the contemporary obsession with the total(itary) recording of the world, with omniscience, is transformed into a poetic gesture as derisory as it is magnificent." 4
- Photogrammetry is a measurement technique that consists of determining the shape, dimensions and location of an object in space from several photographic shots of the object.
- Étienne Hatt, text from the exhibition Implications, 2015
- Quotes from the artist (thilbaultbrunet.fr)
- Sonia Voss, curator of the exhibition
"Just a little longer"
Binome Gallery
19, rue Charlemagne, Paris 4th
From October 5 to November 25, 2023
galeriebinome.com
Thibault Brunet, solo show
Offscreen, Grand Garage Haussmann
43-44, rue de Laborde, Paris 8th
From October 18 to 22, 2023
Offscreenparis.com
