Description
I. The Hybrid Palimpsest: A Visual Archaeology
My technical approach is not limited to a choice of medium; it constitutes the very foundation of my philosophy. Here, I reinvent the concept of the palimpsest—this parchment scraped to receive new writing—not through erasure, but through stratification.
By painting with acrylics on a canvas transformed into a photograph, and then integrating digital animation, I construct a veritable temporal stratification. Van Gogh's work, "Vase with Five Sunflowers," then becomes the substrate, the geological memory of my creation. A striking dialogue is established, a fertile tension between the palpable texture of the acrylic (the impasto, the physical trace of the gesture) and the immaterial light of digital painting.
I define this approach as Sub-realism. Unlike Surrealism, which seeks the "beyond" of reality, my sub-realism explores the "beneath." I paint the underlayers of reality, those invisible vectors that precede the fixed form of the sunflower. It is a proposal for an emotional X-ray of the original work.
II. Xanthopsia: Resilience and the Alchemy of Color
The title of the collection, Xanthopsia (this alteration of vision that tints everything yellow, often attributed to Van Gogh, possibly due to digitalis or absinthe), transcends the medical anecdote here to become a powerful conceptual tool.
In my work, xanthopsia is no longer a pathology, but a philosophical decision, a filter of resilience. It is the utopian capacity to perceive light ("yellow vision") through decay or darkness.
Van Gogh's sunflowers embody the complete cycle of life, from bud to withered flower. My reinterpretation accentuates this duality: the "Van Gogh" section anchors the work in finitude and history, while the "Abstract/Digital" section projects a vital, cyclical, and eternal energy. The yellow then becomes an alchemical gold, the light of the spirit that my digital intervention "reactivates," suggesting that the essence of the work survives its material form.
III. Utopia as a Space for Conversation
By evoking Thomas More and the etymology of ou-topos ("nowhere"), I give the use of digital technology its full philosophical meaning. The hybrid work (canvas + screen) is not utopia itself, but the threshold toward it. It creates a mental space, a space for conversation that exists "nowhere" physically, but intensely in the viewer's consciousness.
The work leaves its status as a finished object of "Still Life" to become a process, a "Moment of Life." Stop-motion animation doesn't tell a linear story; it keeps the work in a perpetual present, a utopian "now."
This is where the heart of my perception lies: personally, I see my canvas move simply by looking at it. For me, the vibration is already there, within the static matter. Digital animation is therefore not an artificial addition, but a proposition of this already existing movement. It makes the invisible visible. By animating the painterly gesture, I give life to the painter's action (Action Painting), allowing the viewer to witness the emergence of the gesture in real time, in a moment of creation that is indefinitely suspended.
IV. Synthesis: Reinterpretation as an Act of Coexistence
This piece, "ou-topos," proposes a resolution to modern tensions through the harmony of opposites. It demonstrates that classical heritage and digital culture (the glitch, the pixel) are not opposed but coexist in layers. Technology does not erase the past; it reveals it under a new spectrum. By shifting the focus from the object to the intellectual process, I invite the viewer to introspection. The abstract and shifting layers act like a moving Rorschach test, a mirror where each person projects their own quest for meaning and light—their own Xanthopsia.
Tribute to Vincent van Gogh: Still Life: Vase with Five Sunflowers
collection: Destroyed during the American bombing of Ashiya in 1945
2160 x 3840 px / 4K MP4 / 181 MB / 8 fps / 1/1 edition