São Paulo, Brasil
25/05/2024 - 27/07/2024

SPIN MACHINE

Pascal Dombis

May 24, 2024

The age we live in is inextricably linked to speed. The speed and the rhythm of information flow, along with the rapid reproduction and multiplication of images, have seen a steep increase over the past decade, largely due to digital AI technology. The internet, initially conceived as a tool for knowledge, along with internet browsers and social network platforms, has evolved into a tool for propaganda and advertisement, serving a globalized economy and shaping thought on a global scale. And Pascal Dombis is undoubtedly one of the French visual artists who, since the mid-1990s, has best captured the magnitude and profundity of these post-digital transformations.

First shown in Brazil in 2008 on the façade of the Instituto Itaú Cultural building, in São Paulo, and more recently featured in a 2022 solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Sorocaba, Pascal Dombis’s new exhibition, now on show at Dan Galeria Contemporânea, features thought-provoking, multifaceted and multiform pieces that use the flow of digital information to challenge and destabilize the universal notion of time.

In the early 1990s, while completing his studies in Boston, Dombis discovered the creative-artistic potential of information technology tools. After returning to France, he transitions from painting to algorithmic art. Shortly after, he joined the first fractalist art group, from which he eventually distanced himself to pursue the exploration of something other than fractal themes. Later, Dombis focused on the use of repetition to create geometric and typographic forms, designing digital frescoes and murals, lenticular lenses and video installations. Using simple visual forms, Dombis employed algorithms to produce a prolific and exceptional array of images, creating effects which are at once exceedingly unexpected and complex.

From the 2000s onwards, Dombis adopted his trademark use of the multiphasic or lenticular technique, creating the illusion of movement and of an uninterrupted flow of information. Conducive to the rapid formation of “visual incidents”, the lenticular technique uses the angle of incidence of light to filter through layered images and texts, imparting an unexpected visual depth to the pieces. The use of such augmented reality devices allows the viewer to directly engage with the artwork through movement, prompting them to contemplate the pieces from different vantage points, leading to sensory experiences in which chance and imprecision play a seminal role. While Dombis does not strictly adhere to the tenets and techniques of Op Art, his work exudes a similar quality of visual instability, achieved through the use of optical effects reminiscent of works by the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel [Research Group for Visual Art] (1960/1968), whose members included Sobrino (whose works were shown at Dan Galeria in 2022), Le Parc, Morellet, Yvaral and Garcia Rossi. However, while GRAV emphasizes art’s role as a vehicle for social commentary and critique, Dombis questions the fundamental nature of images and our perception of them, particularly in a context of uncontrolled proliferation of images.

Among Dombis’s captivating and thought-provoking works, the Post Digital Mirror and Post Digital Surface series stand out as masterful embodiments of the paradigm of reflection due to their copious and innovative use of digital technology. The artist’s relentless layering of images results in monochromatic pieces that create the startling illusion of a reflective surface, saturated with electric colors. These post-digital mirrors reveal a mesmerizing moiré effect, whose activation is entirely dependent on the viewer’s movements. With these series, Dombis exposes the emptiness of the ephemeral and disappearing image, establishing an elusively dynamic interplay, a strict interdependence between viewer and artwork. The accidental and incidental dimension of these works – with their unexpected forms and stochastic color schemes – are products of the flicker effect. The famous Dreamachine created in 1959 by Brion Gysin, a close friend of writer William S. Burroughs, constitutes a materialization of the sensory experience produced by the flicker by pushing the boundaries of optical stimulation and variability with a view to destabilizing the viewer’s perception of space-time. Spin Machine, the centerpiece that lends its name to the exhibition, operates on the same principle as the Dreamachine, inducing a hypnotic experience through rotating or spinning boxes whose surfaces capture and reflect light in mesmerizing lenticular patterns.

The exhibition also features THE END OF ART IS NOT THE END, an important interactive installation, part of one of Dombis’s most iconic series. The installation is composed of over 20,000 Google-sourced images, gleaned from online searches about “The End of Art”. The piece explores the multiple meanings and interpretations of the so-called end of art, as well as its consequences, while also delving into an examination of the broader theme of “endings”, a recurring subject in contemporary times: e.g. the end of man, the end of civilization, the end of ideologies, the end of history and, naturally, the end of the world itself. “The end of art is not the end”, a quote by Ad Reinhardt, known for his Radical Paintings is mixed in with the relentless flow of images, thus creating a continuous narrative fabric which adheres to the wall like skin. By employing textured surface of lenticular lenses as an imaginal decoder of an informational-pictorial meshwork, the artist encourages a direct interaction between viewer and artwork – the viewer him or herself “moves the piece around”, thus actively unveiling that which is unseen and unnamable. This playful photographic arrangement invites viewers to engage in an elusively fragmentary manner with the artwork, using their own bodies to navigate a vast collection of ephemeral and useless data – a collection of data which is destined to fade into oblivion.

The urban artist’s monitory artwork questions and confronts the structural changes that accompany societal evolution. Our future, as well as the memories of our past, hinges on the insightful observations of this urban artist. Dombis’s creative process, which begins with a simple algorithmic postulate or a recurring query in a search engine, seamlessly evolves into an endless, dazzling, yet ephemeral quest for understanding. The notion of time (or times) finds itself deeply embedded in his body of work: the time that stretches out into an infinite curve; the time whose speed is in sync with machines and their calculations; the elastic, dilating time which extends into fourth-dimensional space.

Pascal Dombis’s SPIN MACHINE exhibition constitutes a mosaic of visual and sensorial experiments, through which the artist captures and re-channels the signals of an impending demise by meticulously examining the uncontrolled proliferation of imaginal and pictorial sequences and data and transposing them into digital collages, a dreadfully dense visual meshwork which foreechoes its own annihilation.

Franck James Marlot