Recently I went to Pascal Dombis’s Parisian studio to look into the large public artwork that he will be installing at end of this year at the National School of Architecture in Strasbourg. While there, I formulated some general reflections on his work.
Pascal Dombis and Gil Percal (architect), project proposal for foot-bridge under face, Strasbourg, France
For awhile now, Dombis has been creating perverse computer-assisted paintings that seem to try to overthrow, or at least displace, modern rationality in favor of a digitally debauched version of some vaguely remembered, disordered, non-mathematical emergence; now numerically manipulated and prefigured. This techno re-inventiveness of emergence is accomplished by Dombis’s manipulating computer-generated hyper-structures which he synthesizes into abstract digital paintings. To my eye, within the borders of his post-conceptual practice, Dombis’s complex results automatically hasten an elaborate visual irrationality via the most rational of means.
Just as antediluvian groups attempted to deal with the repetitious cosmos through irrational excess; so seemingly do these computer-performed simulations operate to make the rational/geometrical world move inexhaustibly towards irrationality. Thus his is a post-structuralist recovery of its own fallacious nature. Consequently, his hyper-geometric art leads us to a teeming process of rational expurgation through supra-rational excess.
Pascal Dombis, Post-Digital Mirror, 2013
To do so, Dombis methodically uses an elementary warped prototype as his computational starting point, so as to advance an inhumanely complex pictorial space in which he addresses a miscellaneous collection of network issues; such as complexity, perpetuation, enrichment, and chaos. By commencing with a singular and uncomplicated warped constituent (a lonely fragment of a curve or a diminutive portion of an arc) and by maniacally computationally reproducing it, Dombis achieves an intensely elaborate geotectonic optic structure, rich in associative significance. Into this elastic virtual matrix rushes a relentless machine-logic, one bent on achieving a contemporary techno hyper-irrationality of the sort which is becoming more and more familiar to us in all aspects of our lives.
This process of irrationality is ironic in that Dombis uses the computer in a simple, fundamental, computational way so as to incessantly compute the curved geometric element (the resulting intricate geotectonic configurations would be impractical to generated by hand as they are made up of tens of thousands to several million bowed constituents). Indeed Dombis sees this methodology as “a kind of Arte Povera within new technologies.”
Dombis, Irrationnal-Geometrics, 2011
Regardless, Dombis uses the resultant manic geometric hyper-structures so as to create an illusionary space that plays with the ambiguity between the mathematic structure produced by the computer and its metaphorical elucidation on a pictorial surface; elucidations in which the original motif disappears into the scrolling network.
So long as his rational-irrational fabrications can mathematically multiply and permutate undisturbed by any apparent coherent restraint, there is no impeding them from attaining ever amplifying spectral capabilities. Hence I am delighted to see his rational/irrational simulacrums proceed to blast away prior rational geometric pretexts so as to bring us closer to irrational excess.
Summer Show
Galerie Pascal Janssens
Het Kapittelhuis, Lange Kruisstraat 6F, 9000 Gent
14 Jun. 2014 > 15 Sept. 2014
Public Artwork in process
Location: National School of Architecture, Strasbourg
Pascal Dombis and Gil Percal (architect)
Foot-bridge under face, Digital print on 3-componant glass panels, 9.00 x 2.50 m
Client/Commissioner: French Ministry of Culture, commissioned for the school building extension.
In process, to be installed end of 2014
0 Comments