Personal exhibition
Villa Henry, Nice
Curator Isabelle Pellegrini

From March 25 to April 28, 2018, on appointment
Opening with the artist on March 24 from 14h to 19h
Talk from 4pm to 5pm with Thierry Fournier, Isabelle Pellegrini and Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri, exhibition curator and art critic, director of the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux

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Isabelle Pellegrini presents Machinal at the Villa Henry, a solo exhibition by Thierry Fournier that follows his residency for the creation of En Vigie, associated here with three other works.

Today, many images are no longer produced in immediate relation with the human eye, but are produced autonomously by machines and programs. Most of these “assisted visions” are deployed in the military or on the web (Google, Apple, Facebook…), where the detection and anticipation of behaviors is often using similar means for security or commercial purposes. These “intelligent machines” analyze images but can also perform autonomous actions, as in the case of UAVs. In this context, how do we still define our gaze and responsibility? What is our role when we are dealing with systems that not only extend our vision but anticipate it, even replace it? Do we expect machines to look at our place – even to look at us and define us? What are we trying to see (or not see) through them?

Thierry Fournier’s practice frequently posits the fictional hypothesis that things (objects, landscape, network, machines…) would have their own life, by creating situations of displacement or confrontation with them. With the exhibition Machinal, he brings together four works in which our gaze is inseparable from that of these devices. The term “machinal” here refers both to a thought that no longer pays attention to its object (or whose attention is absorbed and captured by devices, as on the Internet) – and the look produced by the machines themselves, autonomously: machinal as one would say animal. The classical frameworks of the gaze as perspective and horizon are then redefined as a territory that is shared, even negotiated, between our own vision and the one that devices deploy on the world and on ourselves.

En Vigie / Nice (2018) is a generative video where a program scrutinizes a landscape of horizon, deploying a cinematographic suspense that invites us to espouse its own logic. The installation Just in Case (2017) ironically imagines that a program would be legitimate to detect if we are indeed human, riveting us to the spectacle of its calculation and waiting for its verdict. With Penser voir (2018), a surveillance camera targeting a beach testifies by a synthetic voice of its inability to detect anything. The series of digital images Non-Lieu (2016) uses photographs of bombardments found on the web and replaces everything that makes it possible to identify the place with a background pattern. Through this set of four pieces, the exhibition proposes a more general reflection on the links and limits between humans and machines, our responsibility and our gaze.

Around the exhibition

A talk will take place on March 24, 4pm to 5pm, with Thierry Fournier, Isabelle Pellegrini and Fabienne Grasser-Fulchéri, exhibition curator and art critic, director of the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux.

Pandore Édition also publishes a catalogue that includes a text by critic and philosopher Céline Flécheux (L’horizon, Klincksieck, 2014; L’horizon, des traités de perspective au Land Art, P. U. de Rennes, 2009), an interview with Isabelle Pellegrini and documentation on the works.