20040312 Print

The theme of my work is complexity. Most of the natural objects around us display an amazing visual complexity. The bark of a trunk, a rocky cliff, the surface of a planet; they all show lush details and omnipresent fractal structures, which make their visual richness and beauty. The limitations of traditional art media have always made it difficult for artist to capture this characteristic feature of our visual experience. In contrast, the power of algorithmic and generative techniques allow producing highly elaborate abstract images. The main aim of my work is to explore this amazing richness of patterns and structures, in an attempt to capture the essence of visual complexity. A technique I have been developing for many years is called pattern piling. Copies of a simple pattern are created at various size scales and are merged together. More recent images are obtained by the iteration of certain conformal maps of the sphere having everywhere dense chaotic orbits. The common point of these techniques is that they yield images so complex that they could never have been imagined, let alone realized, by a bare human mind. Each of them forms a little abstract world, an algorithmic world, where shapes and colors are combined according to simple rules, yielding rich structures in which the observer's eye can wander and get lost. Please visit my website for recent works. .worlds