Metz, France, 1965

If in our time the measure of all things is checked by the relentless rhythm of algorithms, the work of Pascal Dombis does nothing less than introduce us to the immeasurable extent of this time. For here, the digital is not just the technical medium of artistic achievement, but its indispensable theme, a simultaneously wonderful and uncomfortable presence that makes us perplexed in face of the inflections of contemporaneity.

Therefore, Dombis’ digital and post-digital works generate the chaotic and the irrational from the inseparable rationality of computational algorithms, extrapolating them through excessive repetitions combined with the imponderable factor of randomness, which ends up invading the borders of the unknown and the unthinkable. This is exemplary in his explorations of fractal geometry, in which repetitive patterns, bending lines and straightening curves give rise to virtual spaces that mysteriously act on the viewer’s sensibility. Thus, in the Antisana series (2000-2008) computationally generated visual tangles were printed and fixed onto smooth walls, forging spaces that suggest endless depth from the two-dimensional surface, while in the Irrational Geometrics (2005-2016) the lines, taken as an elementary principle of the real, they are bent and stretched in all directions, amidst the spectrum of colors in perpetual motion, as a metonymic sign of the endless process of generation and mutation that governs the being itself. Likewise, lines also appear as a principle of temporality, which is manifested in the Spin series (2006-2012), in which countless circles give visual form to the circularity of time, or in Blink installations (2005-2009), in that monochromes are projected alternately in increasing acceleration to the point of generating lines that only appear to the viewer’s perception.

In addition to these chaotic and irrational lines and curves, Dombis’ work also involves signs and symbolic systems, which are destructured and overcome. Based on the linguistic speculations of William Burroughs and his cut-up technique, Dombis unites textuality in art with the randomness provided by algorithms, seeking to overcome control systems based on words and writing in order to open up a new relationship with linguistic signs . This is witnessed in several works, such as the Text(e)~Fil(e)s (2010-2015) installations, in which paths constellated by textual fragments and passages are created, whose ordering and typography is computationally determined, so as not to only involving passers-by in an experience that highlights the ubiquity of writing in all environments, but also changes its relationship with words, which no longer appear passively, but require the time and free involvement that are essential for its decipherment.

The same challenge is posed by Dombis to our relationship with digital images. In several works, the artist makes use of a multi-thematic image bank built from Google searches combined with the game of revelation and concealment provided by lenticular materials, so that the viewer is required to constantly move and linger before of images that deny the rapidity of the unrestricted flows of the imagery regime that prevails today, putting itself before the increasingly accentuated cultural tendency to make looking an impossible act. We can find such a negative act in different moments with distinct highlights: in Image-Flux (2008-2013), the artist seeks to generate meta-images and meta-stories that return a possible narrativity to the infinite dispersed images; in Meta-Google (2015-2018), Dombis uses Google images searched on Google itself to form a mirror image that reflects the performance of technology on life and death, which consolidates a diffuse sense arising from disappearance of something indeterminate; while in Crackography (2018-2019), imaginary territories are traced that constitute landscapes from which the fissures protrude that at the same time threaten and question the present and the future.

Thanks to all these aspects, Dombis’ art repeatedly emerges as an indication of an original co-presence between rational and irrational, of an inevitable intrusion of lack of control among control systems, of an overcoming of the human by the powers created by it, but also as the opportunity for a suspicion about ourselves capable of leading us into the unknown and unthinkable, of launching us once again into a sensitivity and a thought accustomed to those risks from which the new comes.

VRP