Raw material

The creative project Raw Material is based on the use of volumetric selfie captures, transformed into virtual environments, to create digital paintings that are printed, animated, and Fulldome. The artist uses his own physical identity as the source for extracting aesthetic forms, based on the metaphor of mining a digital resource.

Raw Material showcases a creative process that favors chance, randomness, contingency, accidents, and deformity in relation to the fluctuating representation of identity, for which the artist's volumetric selfies serve as the raw material. Perspectives transform the concrete nature of the captures into an abstract virtual space. And capture accidents, such as empty spaces or distortions resulting from gaps in digital scanning, are deliberately left visible, or even induced. Rather than seeking to erase the imperfections of realism or hide pixels, noise, and scanning issues, Yan Breuleux exploits their expressive potential. 

The work also embodies the principle of uniform temporality, where the transformation of the paintings unfolds so slowly that it becomes almost imperceptible. To an observer, the environments initially appear frozen when viewing the paintings. However, after several minutes, when they look at the works again, they notice that all the environments have subtly evolved in both form and color.

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The exhibition experience is based on the presentation of a series of animated paintings whose transformation speed sits on the threshold of stillness, with a total duration ranging from four to twelve hours depending on the piece. The triptych, which lasts nine hours, is composed of three temporal states of the same animation. This composition allows for the simultaneous perception of three different states of movement within a single animation. These states evolve gradually, making it difficult for anyone to view the entire sequence. The animations result from camera movements produced within an environment composed of the artist's face multiplied into point clouds. The digital material of this multiplied face thus becomes an environment of abstractions from which the artist has selected specific viewpoints. During the creative process for the paintings, Yan moves randomly to choose camera angles. These then serve as interpolation points for creating the animations.

The image ratio is 2:1 to allow for conversion into a 360° immersive format