portraits
Portrait
Digital creation

Jacques Perconte presents "Terre Céleste" at the Galerie Charlot

Everything that happens in my images is the result of movement captured from reality by my camera.

A key artist on the contemporary scene, Jacques Perconte has turned his manipulation of digital images into a vocabulary that enables him to create original and poetic landscape art. He is exhibiting Terre Céleste at the Galerie Charlot from 7 April to 17 June 2023, as part of ISEA 2023, the international electronic arts symposium. To mark the occasion, 20 international professionals have been invited by the Institut Français to discover the exhibition as part of the Focus on Digital Arts

Updated on 26/05/2023

2 min

Since the latter half of the 1990s, Jacques Perconte has been experimenting with digital images, cultivating a fascination for the way they can make and break reality. A fan of bugs and tinkering rather than programming, for almost two decades he has been playing with file compression to create videos of landscapes in which vibrant patterns deconstruct the image, in a poetic attempt to restore its meaning. A member of several art collectives and regularly exhibited in France and abroad, Jacques Perconte first drew attention with a hypnotic sequence shot at Père Lachaise Cemetery for Leos Carax's film Holy Motors. His film Après le feu (2010), shot in Corsica after a fire between Ajaccio and Corte, has also made the rounds of the most prestigious festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival.

Nature plays a central role in the work of Jacques Perconte, who works almost exclusively with landscapes that are captured, most of the time, in motion. Different locations and different series become the starting point for a recording that is then reworked. By using the process of compression, which reduces the size of digital files by deliberately removing visual information, Jacques Perconte creates hypnotic moving pictures that reveal both the artificiality of the digital image and its ability to capture light and time. Anxious to make his practice accessible, he is keen to collaborate (with Jeff Mills and Vincent Segal, for example), and offers the public wider access to his works and archives via his website. Music, which accompanies all his videos, also plays a central role in his practice. He works regularly with artists such as Samuel André, Jean-Benoît Dunkel and Simonluca Laitempergher. 

Jacques Perconte's work is currently on show at Galerie Charlot as part of the Terre Céleste exhibition. Mountains play a central role in the exhibition, with several series of videos and prints that reveal a highly singular art of landscape, halfway between abstraction and the opening up of new dimensions. As film historian Nicole Brenez writes, "nothing about the machine is foreign to him, so he provokes it, pushes it to its limits, learns from its inadequacies and creates from its errors. ... Jacques Perconte's aesthetic roots are in the power of impression, both phenomenological and pictorial." Several of his works, including Europa Aour, were also exhibited in Brussels in 2022, as part of the French Presidency of the European Union. 

  • 2010

    2010

    "Après le feu."

  • 2012

    2012

    Collaborates on Holy Motors, by Leos Carax.

  • 2013

    2013

    Retrospective at the Côté Court festival.

  • 2023

    2023

    "Terre Céleste", exhibition in partnership with the ISEA 2023.

L'institut français, LAB