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A Look At Jacques Perconte’s Digital Impressionism

The prolific artist bridges France's artistic past with its present.
Still from Paris (2013) via

Still from Les Moutiers (2012) via

Jacques Perconte is regarded as one of France’s preeminent internet artists, but it’s hard to find exactly why he’s attributed with such a title. The fact that he worked with the InfoZone mixed media artists workshop in Paris during the late 90s gives some suggestion, as well as his complicity in forming the internet art collective Leudit.org, but other than that his portfolio gets pretty hazy pre-Y2K. Outside his blog’s archives, there’s little bandwidth on what he was up to during the internet’s sunrise.

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Regardless, his range of contemporary work is arresting enough to render past claims inconsequential; which is why, at age 40, Perconte is still a major contender in the French digital arts sphere. He’s almost too prolific for one human being (if your browser is still loading his portfolio, trust us, it’s not a problem with your internet), yet somehow he’s managed to sharpen that rapid output in a way that prevents his work from ever losing its benchmark spectrality. His video pieces that give a glitched-out take on his country's impressionism-filled history is ever stunning, a bridge between France's artistic past and present.

Perconte has a new exhibition starting this Wednesday at the Galerie Charlot in Paris, France called From East to West, which documents his exploration of the French hinterlands alongside mixed media artist Julie Rousse (Mille-lumières), and a view from his plane of the alps connecting southern France with northern Italy (Alpi).

It’s all “digital impressionism” in style, with each video bridging the classic landscape portrait with its tangible landscape subject. The bridge employed? A generative recording of visual and mental processes: how an image transforms away from the objective into the subjective within the artist’s mind. Even more evident, though, is how easily these videos seduce your concentration out of the present and into the burst of colors glitching across your screen.

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See some stills and video previews of his work below:

Still from Vague Vache (2012)

Vague vache (vache vague)

 from

Jacques Perconte

 on

Vimeo

.

Stills from Santa Madalena Rocha (2013) via. Different frames of the same large ocean rock, as waves repeatedly crash into it.

Stills from Alpi (2014).

Alpi, dicembre / premier exrait, janvier 2014

from

Jacques Perconte

on

Vimeo

.

Stills from Mille-lumières (2014) via

For more on Jacques Perconte, visit his website here.

Follow Johnny Magdaleno on Twitter: @johnny_mgdlno