Galerie Lara Vincy.

For his second one-man exhibition in the gallery, Pierre Braun shows a new approach to the graphic research he has carried out for the past thirty years with his computer. His exhibition in the Lara Vincy gallery in 1999 anticipated the media’s archeology and sought to bear witness to the notion that the inkjet printer was also a full time creative instrument, like the camera or the micro-computer. Since then, his complicity with the machines has become more radical by querying the codes and the data, based on his practice of programmed drawing. His creations evolve discretely by seeking to thwart the algorithms whose flux of information have become the constitutive elements of our reality. What can we retain from those millions of images that stream past every day? How to bear witness to our sensitivity as we keep company with the machines?
If the new techniques of visualization of givens, big data and cartographs of every kind, attempt to provide us with a new approach to the world's business, Pierre Braun recalls that the tools that handle computer material send us back to the pioneering idealism of Computer Art.
Falsely condemned to obsolescence, the program he designs is opposed to a program whose final findings are predictable. Beyond the virtuosity or the high accomplishments of Computer Art, Pierre Braun pushes the machine and the program’s logics into their corners. The set of givens that enable the material traces are subjected to the machine’s assaults and to those of the code that enlivens it. But the series on the loops could also be viewed as a graphic laziness on the programs’scale. His “infinite animations” are the object of kinetic twists as to the flow of time. They are the elementary givens of the writing and of the graphics which are once more queried in the programs’ light.
The lines are designed for stock taking and for redundancy. Between scribblings and Cy Twombly, they recall worlds already trodden... (Florence De Mèredieu)
The drawings in the first part, carried out as early as the 80s (Pierre Braun collaborated with François and Véra Molnar) are nowadays the object of specific renewals in gouache on canvas. The tracings carried out by the machine were enlarged and reproduced manually. The hand attempts to follow and to bring back on a human scale the tracings engendered by the machine’s codes. Other drawings on canvas, carried out in free hand, attempt to make up, thanks to the rhythm and the length of execution, some lines of improbable projective tests of time's passage. Obsolete flyers, scraps of paper or graphics in free hand summon up new landscapes of potential data that re-enact, on the body’s scale, the graphic tracings and the treatment of the data nowadays massively carried out by the machines.
If the spirit of the system is a spring in his work, Pierre Braun nonetheless remains on its margins (...) Those margins where the stroke is close to writing and to letters... (Christophe Domino)
That engineering of lost time deliberately produces almost nothing on the scale of a world dominated by digitalization. The objects of filing and of mending, that he describes as an aesthetic stitch-up, those digital humanities reveal how the codes and the programmers that we spend time with, modify the perception of our emancipation and the supposed transparency of technologies. This exhibition offers an approach that is simultaneously graphic and sensorial, whether in the forms of representation or in the practical experiments in the shape of re-creations of an increased reality.
For this exhibition, the Lara Vincy gallery and Présent Composé are publishing a book. It is simultaneously an exhibition catalogue and a selective progression. This experimental publication is designed as a hybrid edition based on the putting in contact of the tangible and of the digital. (the paper edition is linked to the numerical technologies). Graphic re-creations are associated to three graphic works reproduced in the book, available on smartphones and tablets with a specific application to be downloaded. The reader can thus explore and play differently with new graphic sensoriality, even as he pursues the works’ inner spirit elsewhere.

With the kind support of vinetculture.fr