Description
My project "Opus Deux Flagrant," part of the Xanthopsia collection, embodies a bold synthesis of transhistorical reinterpretation, subrealist abstraction, and Bergsonian philosophy, weaving a complex dialogue between materiality, temporality, and perception. By revisiting Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait," I propose a digital and pictorial metamorphosis that transcends conventional homage to explore an ontology of artistic creation where time, memory, and identity fragment and recompose.
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1. Transhistoricity and Bergsonian Duration: Matter as Memory
The superposition of techniques (acrylic, photography, stop-motion animation) materializes Henri Bergson's theory of duration, where time is not a linear succession, but a qualitative and shifting flux. By superimposing physical and digital layers, you create a temporal palimpsest:
- Van Gogh's original painting acts as a persistent past, anchored in the material gesture.
- The hand-cut layers and digital animation introduce a fluid, dynamic present, where the image escapes its fixity to become a pulsation...
- The artist's "egregore," which seems to emerge from the canvas, evokes an active collective memory, a lived time that resists objectification, echoing Bergson (Matter and Memory, 1896).
This stratification becomes an allegory of duration: the portrait is no longer a finished object, but a process where Van Gogh's "self" unfolds in oscillations between presence and dissolution, between the historical (the 1889 portrait) and the transhistorical (my abstract reinterpretation). -------------------------
2. Xanthopsia and Duality: Altered Perception as Materialist Utopia
The Xanthopsia collection (yellow vision) transforms a pathology—associated with Van Gogh (hypotheses about his experience of chloropsy)—into a metaphor for aesthetic resilience. Yellow, omnipresent in his Provençal period, here becomes a utopian filter:
- The digital overlay, with its vibrant tones and animations, acts like a prism that decomposes melancholy into luminous energy.
- The subrealist abstraction (between figuration and formal explosion) translates an ontological duality: the artist's "tearing" from the canvas reflects Van Gogh's tensions between madness and genius, between confinement and transcendence.
- This duality extends to my mixed media: the physical (canvas, acrylic) symbolizes anchoring in reality, while the digital (animated layers) embodies escape into a collective imagination, a shared duration. -------------------------
3. Subrealism and Hybridization: Towards a New Ontology of the Image
My "unconventional" approach redefines the portrait as a field of forces:
- Subrealism: By fragmenting Van Gogh's face, I go beyond surrealism (unconscious dream) to explore a spectral realism, where identity dissolves into impulsive energies (agitated features, colliding colors).
- Technological Hybridization: The digitization of the photographed canvas is not a simple reproduction, but a transmutation. The stop-motion animation introduces an almost biological rhythm, recalling Bergson's theories on the vital impulse—creation as perpetual movement.
- The revisited "Self-Portrait" thus becomes a body-opera: the canvas is a stage where the struggle between the individual (Van Gogh) and the archetype (the cursed artist) is played out, between the world-work and its deconstruction.
tribute to Van Gogh : Self-portrait
see original at: Orsay Museum
format / media / size / speed / timing / éditions :
2160 x 3840 px / 4k mp4 / 116 MB / 8 fps / 59s / 1/1