Marc Vuillermoz

A painter and academic, for around fifteen years I have been combining research and creation to highlight the way in which new media shape our perception of the sensitive world.

The images that inspire my pictorial work are not photographs, but raw images provided by screenshots taken from amateur video clips or the Google maps function. However distinct they may be in their mode of production, these two documentary sources share a common ambition: to deliver to the stunned spectator a striking image of reality while making us forget the artifices that govern its creation. On the internet, one of the main springs of this illusion lies in the solidarity of images in the flow that contains them. Each image builds on the previous one, extends it and replaces it. But when one of them is extracted from its original environment, it disintegrates, becomes strange: all its imperfections, erased until then by the process of succession, stand out with a particular acuity and distance it from its referent. However, the eye instructed by painting immediately finds its bearings and its gratifications there.

What I seek to exploit in my paintings are therefore the pictorial potential of these imperfect images, which sometimes border on abstraction. This aesthetic approach is accompanied by a reflection on the digital image, whose uses, in the era of post-photography, have profoundly changed our understanding of the surrounding reality.

To pictorially translate the "noise" of unprocessed digital images, I have developed a particular technique of oil painting on greasy coatings. After covering a sheet of plywood with a thick layer of coating worked with a spatula, I sand my support to give it a practically smooth appearance. I then paint in successive, very diluted layers. However, as soon as the juices come into contact with the support, the underlying relief reappears because the pigments invest primarily the micro-interstices of the coating crust. This results in a particular vibratory effect: the contours of the objects branch out, the material disperses in unexpected directions, the roughness of the support sometimes contradicts the brushstroke. It is in this permanent tension between the control of the gesture and the randomness that I conceive my pictorial approach.