This is both a movement of contemporary painters and a web event. These
painters assembled behind the name "Art and Complexity Group" and
they were introduced to the public as "fractalist painters" by the virtual
gallery Nart,
together with an exhibition by eleven of them. The highlight of the
operation was a auction sale of the exhibited works on the web, in early
1998, but the exhibition remained in place in the website. It could be
that the Nart gallery was inspired by the great success in the media of a
previous virtual auction sale, organized at the end of 1996 by
Fred Forest,
but whereas in the latter everything was virtual (including the sold artwork),
the fractalist paintings are truly real.
About thirty paintings are shown on the Nart website and they are
accompanied with various texts, self-presentations by the artists,
general comment papers written by a journalist (Henri François Debailleux),
a philosopher (Christine Buci Glucksmann) and a writer (Susan Condé), and
the manifesto of the movement, translated below. For a sampling, if you
are not patient enough to explore the Nart website, you may click on the names
of some of these painters,
Pascal Dombis,
Carlos Ginzburg,
Yvan Rebyj,
Pierre Zarcate,
to see their pages in the site, together with some of their works.
The manifesto of the Art and Complexity Group
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( if in doubt, see the French text)
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- We are gathering on the ground of common proposals. Through our works,
this group asserts the paradigm of the chaotic-fractal complexity.
- First of all, the problematics of Art and Complexity is a
visual organization, the potential for a boundless construction in an endless
process.
- Our fractalist activity emerges through universes full of random
proliferous shapes.
- We are giving up the Euclidean rationality to the benefit of
unexpected and unplanned processes.
- The labyrinthic vision and its random path propose to rebuild the
imagination and to open a new perspective.
- In the order-disorder spiral, the work is the ephemeral emergence of
a hybridation and a crossing.
- The fractalist activity, from painting to the most recent
technologies, crystallizes a materialization field for lattices, scale
plays, proliferation, self-similarity, hybridation, recursivity, lossy
structures, butterfly effect, strange attractors, infinitization.
- All our works are maximalist. This is through the excess of informations
that one reaches the fractal vertigo.
- The paradigm of the chaotic-fractal complexity constitutes the
privileged dynamics of the modern research for practices and knowledge.
- We now enter a complete rebirth of the creation model.
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I do not comment this manifesto but emphasize the importance
given to fractals
Two forerunners
At least two famous artists, Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey,
could be regarded as forerunners of this
movement (the former was already quoted by Christine Buci
Glucksmann), at least in a few of their paintings, as shown below.
It is difficult to say more without seeing the real
works. The two "details" below are roughly
40 x 55 cm and 23 x 32 cm in the real world,
while the fractalist works linked above are around
1 m x 2 m. All
these reproductionsare far too small on the screen.
detail of Cathedral Jackson Pollock, 1947
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detail of Shadow Spirits of the Forest, Mark Tobey,
1961
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These two paintings were done well before the Mandelbrot discoveries. Of
course, as the Michael Barnsley book says, Fractals (are)
Everywhere, and it was always possible to make fractals without
knowing it.
Preceding Page
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[ Art and Fractals Contents ]
- Discovering the fractal world:
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Introduction -
Mandelbrot Exploration -
Lyapounov Exploration -
Von Koch Curves -
IFS Fractals -
Fractal Dimension -
Mandelbrot Relatives -
Finest Fractal Pictures -
Software -
Biblio and Links
- Fractals and mysticism:
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Introduction -
The Mysticism of Infinite -
Non-Euclidean Art?
- A new Art?
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Introduction -
Fascination of Fractals -
Fractals and Photography -
Definitions of Art -
The Colour Choice -
Other Colour Choices -
Fractalists Painters -
Compositions with Mandelbrot -
Put a pretty girl -
Algorithmic Art -
Beyond the "Fractal" Art
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