Description
1. Subrealist and Unconventional Reinterpretation of the "Arena in Arles"
My work, Personal Tribalism in Society, performs an abstract deconstruction of Van Gogh's painting, transposing his expressionist universe into a subrealist aesthetic—a realism fractured primarily by the composition, made from a reinterpretation of the work as an abstraction on canvas, virtually cut like a breach through the digital prism and collective memory. By hybridizing acrylic paint (organic textures, impasto, and geometry with animist depths reminiscent of cave material), photography (capturing the canvas as an artifact), and digital animation (minimalist, quasi-ritual movements), I create a visual palimpsest where the original bullfight becomes a metaphor for contemporary rituals.
- Abstraction as Genetic Archaeology: The fragmented forms evoke the primordial gestures of cave art, suggesting that our social behaviors (networks, identity performances) replay tribal patterns. The slow-moving, frame-by-frame animation recalls the immutable cycles of civilizations, while the digital overlays symbolize the erosion/alchemy of cultures in the age of artificial intelligence.
- Van Gogh Duality / Hybrid Subculture: The chromatic treatment (yellow vision) blurs the boundaries between violence (red of the arena) and the minimalist spirituality of the broad strokes of sub-cloisonism, freed from the formal attachment to a representative figure (digital animation), reinterpreting Van Gogh's tensions between chaos and transcendence.
2. Philosophy of the Xanthopsia Collection: Altered Perception and Resilient Utopia
The collection explores the idea of a yellow vision—a deliberate filtration of reality that transforms dystopias (algorithmic, AI, cultural) into spaces of creation. Personal tribalism… extends this dialectic:
- Digital Rituals and Ancestral Memory: The minimalist animations evoke shamanic dances or TikTok loops, revealing an unconscious continuity between sacred gestures and scrolling. The photographed canvas becomes a relic, the animation its ghost.
3. Hybridity as Cultural Resistance
My mixed media embodies an archaeology of the future:
- Acrylic and Pixels: The physical texture recalls the body (the artist's hand, the grain of the canvas), while the digital simulates the immaterial (algorithm, data flow). Together, they symbolize the conflicting coexistence of the organic and the synthetic.
- Subrealism: This style, somewhere between figuration and abstraction, reflects our fragmented perception (augmented reality, generative AI), while anchoring the work in Van Gogh's artistic lineage.
4. Conclusion: Art as a Transhistorical Palimpsest
Personal tribalism in society is not a simple reinterpretation, but a ritual of reactivating artistic memory. By blending the ancestral gesture (painting) with contemporary language (animation), I propose a mindful meditation equivalent to the one I find myself in when I create the work:
This work, like the entire Xanthopsia collection, is a manifesto: art survives not through purity, but through the hybridization, reinterpretation, and contamination of media. It invites us to contemplate, like Van Gogh before the sunflowers, the light that persists in the cracks of reality.
Tribute to Van Gogh: « Arena at Arles / Spectators in the Arena at Arles »
Original at : Hermitage Museum
3840 x 2160 px / 4k MP4 / 97,8 Mo / 5 fps / 1/1 édition