Or / Or, Hawick, may 18

By José Sarmiento Hinojosa

In the Klimt’s gold brought to the melting point by a flaming afternoon sky above Hawick, in the south of Scotland, one bird is crossing the sky. From one end of the horizon to the other, its flight defies space and time, to the extent of making them bend and overlap into each other. The journey to the light is to waive the appearences to embrace a mystical dimension where all become love-light-gold. This infinite flux evolves into harmony of existence and unity of life, where all colors join together, kiss and blend.
In Hawick, in the middle of the Teviot River, May 4, 2018. – Jacques Perconte

Digital alchemy. Jacques Perconte is a modern alchemist, a master magician of the image. The pixel, that underwhelming element of measure of the digital image, becomes a whole palette of possibilities, a fine brush or a plank vibration, technology in the realm of plastic arts, binary poetry, romantic anarchism, a feverish hallucination of distorted images; always the eye, deceived by the underlying magic of what it sees. A universe behind a universe, like the machinations of algorithms always pulsating to discover the true reality of light: in what we see lies a hidden veil, a fantasy of representations. Manet, Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Matisse, the canvas, or Perconte and the computer.

Already a pioneer of internet art (an outstanding piece of his “I love you” project is published here, at Desistfilm), Perconte has spent a lifetime discovering the hidden art in the interstices of the digital image. His endless series of works, for installation and cinema, have sprawled hours and hours of meditative journeys through the nature of image, and the image of nature. Like a benevolent creator, Perconte takes and gives back. From nature, its more beautiful images, from technology, the return of a representation in the heights of the greatest painters. It’s a reciprocal coexistence, a habitat where nature is praised with a gift, an offering for the gods. While glitch art has already been vastly explored (Burks, Brizz)  and it’s currently been used (Murata, Silberstein) in cinema and video art today, nobody uses this “manifestation of the error” to such metaphysical depths: the primal cause of a certain source of reality, the creation of image itself.

His latest “Radical Love Study” series, consists so far in two works: Or / Our, Budapest (2018), and Or / Or, Hawick (2018) , both properly scored by Perconte himself. Or / Our Budapest, just three minutes long, escalates from a visual and sound drone into the high tension of drama, where the golden spaces of sky are briefly interrupted by paths of birds which draw impressionist emphasis in the image, an image that breathes in flux, like a living organism of a gold idol, slowly approaching the ignition of the visual field, a path of lava that overflows inside the the matrix of the earth. In his own words, the image slowly approaches the ultimate light, the seventh sphere where absolute love is reached, a-la-Dante. The music fuses Stars of the Lid via Fuck Buttons through the drone works of La Monte Young, a soundtrack for the manifestation of expectation, for the entrance to the gates of heaven.  Or / Or, Hawick immediately Klimt-ian in its intention, awakes from the golden afternoon from a sky in Hawick, Scotland, while it breaks apart like a nebula, like the apparition of a cosmic phenomena inside earth. A bird, a small black dot, is the vessel drifting away from the primal pulse of the universe, as other flying ghosts appear and rip apart the space, again, in white interstices. The score, intensely spiritual, repeats itself, like a mantra, taking a breath to allow the image to then weave a colorful cloth of digital colors, an abstraction that gets near the essence of digital image, or just simply the image, the eye, the eternal patterns of what we call reality.

Perconte latest acts of love are, I dare say, deeply religious in its presence of the spiritual, the closest thing an artist has been for a while to the divine.

Or / our, Budapest, June 18
2018, film, HD 1,79, stereo, 3’34’’
Image + music Jacques Perconte
https://vimeo.com/277122479

Or / Or, Hawick, June 18
2018, film, HD 1,79, stereo, 9’33’’
Image + music Jacques Perconte
https://vimeo.com/277563173