Extract from "Le Temps Fractal"

By Christine Buci-Glucksmann

Thus, inflection is the very essence of bent and mutant forms, ellipsis, spirals and folds. Endlessly virtual, it only exists in the viewer's eyes and in the many manipulations it allows. Hence, when artworks are digital and computer-processed, as it is the case with artists such as Pascal Dombis, Yvan Rebyj or Miguel Chevalier, fractals produce a genuine culture of flux. Surfaces are then the artefacts of a phenomenon usually referred to by scientists as the "butterfly effect", the multiplication of a swift light breathe here becoming a tornado there, in Bermuda. Like in Tatline's art, from the outset, the forms shaped by Dombis are interlacings, ribbons and flows which cover two adjacent walls. Once computerized along a fractal progression and printed, they lead to an actual visual vertigo that dissolves in the apparent mass of details and threads, so as to follow the line-universes of the red, violet and blue curvatures even better. These vectorial fluxes actualize the differential and continuous forces of a Leibniz. Each monad contains a multiversity of worlds and expressions and the monadological space is such that every part expresses the whole, from a certain point of view. What happens then is the emergence of an aerial haptic process (haptô : touch - hold - behold) in which the interference of lines and planes creates an ever expanding and moving space over the walls. Not quite artificial, not quite natural, neither mapping nor topology, it generates a threading space of networks which functions as a visual labyrinth of rhyzomes echoing contemporary architectures with its nimbleness and a common non-organic vitalism.

Catalogue, Xippas Gallery, Paris, 2000

Translation Didier Girard

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