Studies of landscapes and portraits created within video games, landscapes of ruins collected from the internet, amalgamated and reconstructed using photogrammetry 1, 3D digitization of cliffs, virtual images… Thibault Brunet (born in 1982) likes to blur the lines between drawing, painting, sculpture and photography.
Master of "the dilution of reality into the virtual and of photography into computer-generated imagery" 2The artist, who was a guest at the Centre Pompidou's Hors Pistes Festival last winter, returns to the Binome Gallery with his 3D-modeled cloud portraits and a funny collection of gas stations taken from Google Earth.
entitled Typology of the virtualThis 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 cinema.e century, they also refer to a whole section of art history. Indeed, Thibault Brunet likes to infiltrate… particularly video games (see his series Minecraft Explorer launched in 2021 in partnership with scientists) or virtual reality games (Black Box(2018). Created from videos offered by the YouTube website and then modeled in 3D, this series shows the "deadly skeletons of concrete and rubble" 3 From Damascus or Aleppo, resembling decaying virtual models or video game sets. Disturbing landscapes of ruins, as real as they are insubstantial… “Thibault Brunet enters a world where the lines between truth, falsehood, and plausibility seem blurred. […] Derealization and fiction permeate the document. The ruins are timeless and utterly dehumanized, challenging us to distinguish between what is real and what is fabricated. […] The software’s ‘black box’ encodes reality into numerical data and arranges the ruins […] in the form of a model world, somewhere between a video game and a museum display.” 3"This captivating and moving series," reads the description on its website.
An “algorithmic aesthetic”
Cultivating this prism of gamerThibault Brunet develops an "algorithmic aesthetic" unlike any other. 3600 seconds of lightIn 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 once again evoke 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 therefore in this vein, but without a brush or optical photography, that Thibault Brunet continues his exploration of "forms emerging from our dematerialized world." 4 through new virtual spaces. So many "(non)-places where paradoxical images emerge, both 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 4e
From October 5 to November 25, 2023
galeriebinome.com
Thibault Brunet, solo show
Offscreen, Grand Garage Haussmann
43-44, rue de Laborde, Paris 8e
From October 18 to 22, 2023
Offscreenparis.com
