Description
This work is part of a subrealist abstraction approach—a visual language where the familiar and the dreamlike merge—to question the invisible rituals that structure existence. The title, "The Cyclops' Path Remains Unchanged," serves as an allegory of Polyphemus's repetitive and solitary journey, a mirror of Van Gogh's little-known routine: purchasing pigments, acquiring prints, walking to the fields. These ordinary gestures, although constitutive of his identity and practice, remain in the shadow of his legend.
By hybridizing acrylic paint on canvas (impasto texture, thick layers reminiscent of Van Gogh's material) and frame-by-frame digital animation, I create a dialogue between the tangible and the immaterial. The photograph of the physical canvas serves as the basis for a minimalist digital intervention—perhaps superimposed light paths evoking movement, or animated sequences suggesting the repetition of gestures. The subrealist treatment deconstructs the realism of the original to accentuate Abstract Expressionism through movement: the brushstrokes become flows, the Japanese prints that fascinated Van Gogh become windows onto a mental elsewhere.
Philosophical Profoundness: Cyclicity, Isolation, and Duality
The Cyclops Polyphemus—a being with a single, literal and metaphorical vision—symbolizes both the singularity of Van Gogh's gaze and his social isolation. His "unchanging path" refers to the routines that, although invisible, underlie creation and the human condition. At the same time, the Japanese print in the original portrait represents a window onto an exotic ideal, a dreamed-of elsewhere that contrasts with the painter's reality.
This duality—between routine and dream, isolation and cultural connection—is at the heart of your reflection. It echoes the tensions dear to Van Gogh: order and chaos, nature and culture, suffering and beauty. By digitally animating these elements, I give a moving form to this dialectic, suggesting that everyday life itself is a repeated, almost ritualistic performance that escapes our attention.
Conclusion: A Digital Archaeology of Gesture
The Cyclops' Path Remains Unchanged is not simply a tribute to Van Gogh and his approach: it unearths the hidden side of his practice and, in doing so, questions our own invisible routines. By blending classical techniques (palette knife painting, impasto) and digital language (minimalist animation, superposition effects), I propose an archaeology of the artistic gesture—where subrealism serves as a bridge between yesterday and today, between the physical and the virtual. This work asserts that digitally augmented art can reveal the imperceptible layers of past works, and that the everyday—even that of a cyclops or a cursed genius—deserves to be contemplated as the silent theater of our humanity.
Tribute to Van Gogh: « Self-Portrait with Japanese Print »
Original at : Kunstmuseum Basel
2160 x 3840 px / 4k MP4 / 97,8 Mo / 8 fps / 1/1 édition