During the five days of Art Paris Art Fair, “The Origin of the World 2014” covered the facade of the Grand Palais at nightfall with a skin of pixels.
This new monumental work, urban in its scale, draws its inspiration from the world of biology, microorganisms, and cellular automata. Cells multiply in abundance, divide, merge, and proliferate at a sometimes slow, sometimes rapid rate. Everything comes together, comes apart, and changes shape at top speed. These organic universes mingle sometimes with constructivist universes made up of pixels, thereby dismantling the apparent order of this facade so characteristic of the late nineteenth century.
These unstable, black-and-white megapixel tableaux gradually give way to vivid, color-saturated spirals that whirl about and execute genuine choreographic movements to the music of Michel Redolfi. An organic world or a pixilated one, this artificial universe somehow seems to meet up with the universe of living beings. This is a new kind of “technological Baroque” art that gives form to the formless while perpetually replenishing itself. Appearing one after the other, the sixty tableaux will go on to create perturbations, oscillations, fluctuations, even turbulences in the trajectories of these cells. Sinuously rippling curves bring back to life the artificial paradises of the Nineteen Seventies. They create unprecedented visual experiences that are not unreminiscent of psychedelic universes. In the end, what this installation does is pay homage to Mexican muralist artists, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose mural paintings, executed in public spaces, made art accessible to the great majority of people.
