Landscape studies and portraits created inside video games, ruined landscapes collected on the Internet, amalgamated and reconstituted using photogrammetry 1, 3D digitisation of cliffs, virtual images… Thibault Brunet (b. 1982) likes to blur the boundaries between drawing, painting, sculpture and photography.
A master of “the dilution of the real in the virtual and of photography in computer-generated images “2, the artist invited to the Centre Pompidou’s Hors Pistes Festival last winter returns to Galerie Binome with his portraits of 3D-modelled clouds and a bizarre collection of gas stations taken from Google Earth.
Entitled “Typologie du virtuel (Typology of the virtual)”, this series, which began in 2004, is part of a vast program to divert modelled images from the inexhaustible Google Earth landscape. Digitally “redrawn” and decontextualised by the use of an empty, neutral background, these images of service stations floating in a non-space function as symbolic motifs that evoke our consumerist world in perdition. Recurring motifs in 20th-century painting, photography and cinema they also refer to a whole area of art history. Indeed, Thibault Brunet likes to infiltrate… particularly video games (see his “Minecraft Explorer series” launched in 2021 in partnership with scientists) or virtual reality games (“Boîte noire”, 2018).
Created from videos posted on YouTube browser and then modelled in 3D, this series shows the “mortifying skeletons of concrete and rubble” 3 of Damascus or Aleppo resembling deliquescent virtual models or video game sets. Disturbing landscapes of ruins as real as they are inconsistent…” Thibault Brunet penetrates a world where the boundaries between the true, the false and the plausible seem porous. […] Derealisation and fiction invite themselves into the document. Ruins are timeless and dehumanised in every way, challenging us to distinguish between what is real and what is fabricated. […] The software’s ‘black box’ encodes reality in numerical data and arranges the ruins […] in the form of a model-world, halfway between a video game and a museographic rendering” 3, we read on his website about this captivating and moving series.
AN “ALGORITHMIC AESTHETIC”
Cultivating this gamer’s prism, Thibault Brunet develops an “algorithmic aesthetic” like no other. In 3600′ seconds of light, a series he began in 2022, he, “captures the ephemeral beauty of clouds using a virtual space created in a video game”: on a server ordinarily intended for game designers, he acquired three-dimensional models of clouds before staging them within a game engine to capture their chromatic metamorphoses under the effect of a virtual sunrise and sunset cycle… Blurring the boundary between painting and photography, these improbable three-dimensional cumulus clouds floating on monochrome backgrounds refer to a whole iconographic substratum ranging from medieval skies to Digital Art, via Correggio, Jacob van Ruisdael, John Constable, Boudin and Magritte. It’s in this vein, but without brushes and without optical capture, that Thibault Brunet continues with his exploration of “forms emerging from our dematerialised world “4 through new virtual spaces. These are all “(non)-places where paradoxical images emerge, at once precise and shrouded in mystery”. With Thibault Brunet’s collection of clouds, “at once simulacra and artefacts”, “the contemporary obsession with the total(itary) recording of the world, with omniscience, is transformed into a poetic gesture as derisory as it is magnificent”. 4
- Photogrammetry is a measurement technique that consists in determining the shape, dimensions and location of an object in space from several photographic shots of the object.
- Etienne Hatt, Répercussions exhibition text, 2015
- Quotes from the artist (thilbaultbrunet.fr)
- Sonia Voss, exhibition curator
“Thibaut Brunet. Just a little longer “
From October 5 to November 25
Binome Gallery
19, rue Charlemagne, Paris IV
galeriebinome.com
Thibault Brunet, solo show
Offscreen Fair
Grand Garage Haussmann
43-44, rue de Laborde, Paris VIII
October 18 to 22
Offscreenparis.com