Pascal Dombis, “Untitled,” 2021, lenticular printing on aluminum composite/Photo: Dan Galeria Contemporânea
According to Franck James Marlot, who signs the curatorial text of the exhibition, “this playful photographic arrangement invites viewers to engage in an elusively fragmentary manner with the artwork, using their own bodies to navigate a vast collection of ephemeral and useless data—a collection of data which is destined to fade into oblivion.”
The possibility of change or alteration in our perception thanks to technological advancement (which would also imply an ongoing change in the purpose of art in our time) aligns with the narrative about the obsolescence of apprehending the visible world inundated with information that does very little for the development of the human spirit. Dombis walks on the edge of a knife, because he manipulates this universe of data with which he builds his works.
Starting in 1990, when he was finishing his studies in Boston, the artist began experimenting with the possibilities of the informational medium as a tool for artistic creation, directing himself toward plastic and formal solutions that placed him alongside the initial experiments of op art and GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, 1960-1968) by Francisco Sobrino, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Yvaral and Garcia Rossi.
Pascal Dombis, “Untitled,” 2017, lenticular printing on cut mirror and aluminum composite/Photo: Dan Galeria Contemporânea
However, Dombis is not interested in creating fields of illusion that would affirm the artwork in a particular terrain, in a kind of niche where issues related to language and media would be safeguarded from discussions unrelated to art. As we move in front of the works, they alter their own condition of visibility and spatial presence, with a variety of abstract colors and lights. At other times, we see and read phrases in these fields beyond or within the visible field, which allows us, for a moment, to reflect on what we are seeing.
For the artist, more than the formal apparatus that alters visual perception, he is interested in the perception of time that accelerates at the pace of the programmed machine’s response to calculation. Through this ambivalent process, we are, on one hand, invited to be enchanted by the beauty of smooth and luminous color planes and by the structure that moves like a mobile from ceiling to floor, resembling a robot composed of shiny dominoes and, on the other hand, surprised by the invitation to reflect on time and the transience of what we see (not only in the art world). In this way, the artist separates himself from other similar experiences in the field of geometric abstractions of contemporary art.
Dombis understands (like Ad Reinhardt) that the end of art announces, before the end of the world, the moment when man will have full control over the technological means that ultimately alter how we construct and see images and also how we experience time. It no longer makes sense for the artist to use traditional, autographic techniques and their corresponding narrative as means to directly transmit moods, idiosyncrasies and personal temperaments. Therefore, how these images are made also matters, from their generation to the point-by-point, thread-by-thread printing process. “Spin Machine” thus suggests that an operation is underway, whereby at some point this relationship will reverse and the artist will also become a mere spectator of art as an expression and will of the machine, autonomous artificial intelligence, or something similar, conditioning human gazes and desires in unprecedented directions.
Pascal Dombis, “Untitled,” 2017, lenticular printing on cut mirror and aluminum composite/Photo: Dan Galeria Contemporânea
Arthur Danto asserted that “with the philosophical coming of age of art, visuality drops away, as little relevant to the essence of art as beauty proved to have been.” Evidently, visibility and beauty remain important aspects; it is not their end that the author is referring to. Rather, what he declares is that art can no longer be merely a means to deceive or marvel the eyes, a manifestation directed solely at the sensation of the senses. Art must make us think!
Reinhardt’s pursuit of the “ultimate painting” (the black canvases with black backgrounds) was seen as a surrender to a silence that would evoke the final hour, the end of the world. Today we are in a different kind of apocalyptic moment, where the end beckons us in the form of an environment so compromised and altered that it may soon fail to sustain human life, as well as a global economy whose inequalities are so marked that only violence can readjust it or change its distribution form. Pascal Dombis’ art helps us reflect on the illusory sense of security and comfort in a world that is about to transform, one that is close to its dissolution.
“Pascal Dombis: Spin Machine” is on view at Dan Galeria Contemporânea, Rua Amauri, 73, São Paulo, through July 27.
