Jacques Perconte

With “D'Est en Ouest” (From East to West), Jacques Perconte continues his exploration of natural landscapes through the prism of video encoding algorithms. The journey he offers us is not only geographical: it is a plunge into the very matter of the image, where pixels disintegrate and recompose reality according to their own formal logic.

The radical compressions to which he subjects his footage provoke dislocations, ruptures, chromatic eruptions that evoke the most expressionist landscape paintings. Geological masses disintegrate into clouds of colour, forests pixelate into abstract paintings, skies collapse in cascades of data. And yet, despite this formal destabilisation, the landscape remains recognisable, haunted by its own memory. His gesture — broad, aerial, almost cosmic — closely follows the inner rhythms of the territories crossed. Jacques Perconte does not film the landscape: he extracts its intimate vibration, that secret frequency which only the digital glitch can make visible. The gallery thus becomes the site of a simultaneous projection of the world and of its dissolution.

The journey Jacques Perconte invites us on is akin to a double movement. The crossing of a territory, from the Alps, by way of the Puy de Dôme, to the Atlantic coast, becomes the occasion for ever-renewed plunges into the unsuspected densities of a video material that takes on pictorial textures.

Rarely has so broad a gesture, akin to an aerial view, so closely embraced the inner rhythms of geological masses. Jacques Perconte's radical compressions orchestrate dislocations, ruptures in the tectonic plates of the image. The reliefs — sunlit slopes and snowy valleys — melt into massive flows; folds, wrinkles and trickles work from within a generative weave caught in a hypnotic, weightless movement.

Freezing this movement in paper prints makes it possible to catch colours in the act of blossoming, saturated and dazzling, forms coming undone and recomposing according to mysterious algorithms, the image overflowing, brimming with vibrations. A story of multiple becomings, of infinite possibilities, suspended from the vanishing lines of a molten landscape.

If Jacques Perconte's videos reveal, through the patient calculations of a machine always on the verge of losing its grip, the living matter behind the image, his digital prints capture the intensity of the processes at work.

Secret currents now carry us along the shady canals of the Marais Poitevin. The gentle glide of this controlled drift works on reflections and showers, exhalations that pierce the mirror twice over — that of the still, silent stretches of water and that of the digital images, whose sharpness blurs and liquefies. Colours run and spread beyond the grid. Tangles of branches draw phantasmagorical architectures, all reflections, symmetries and plays of depth. A vivid blue vortex stealthily draws us in. Panels, shreds and veils of matter dissipate, so many envelopes of a synaesthetic experience. At the heart of this landscape, now resplendent with emerald-green shimmers running across the surface of the calm water, there is no other secret than that of the image itself, dense and vaporous, unveiling its fluid, undulating texture.