| mer | fixité | vox | temp-réel | vi(t)e | tu(e) | mémoire | machines humaines | exons | fluidité | automate logiques | écrit écran | prothèse neuronale | corps écrit | corps écran |
| <------------ | japanese | critic | music | movies | canvas | prints | biography | french | contact | -----------> |
| Critic In his famous novel The Unknown Masterpiece, Balzac describes the impossible quest of a painter who in the attempt to depict true essence of man on his canvas, and to reach perfect resemblance, confounds himself with his model. Many generations of portraitists have attempted to approach human essence with different aspects of the human being, its’ physique, social status, psychology, and character structures. Xavier Moehr chooses to renew the genre, and to do so, leans on scientific progress in genetics. The artist draws a sample of blood from his model, has it analyzed by a laboratory and obtains a graphic of an isolated sequence representing his genetic code; he then reproduces it in acrylic on large format. This method for the “genetic portrait” enables the artist to leave the world of imitation and to explore another problematic which is : Art as a tool for Communication. Indeed, art seldom imitates nature, it re transcribes its’ language and its’ essence. Plastically analogical to seismographic drawings, Xavier Moehr’s paintings bypass artistic codes in order to adopt a more universal writing, transcending all styles. This scripture ‘among the living’ seems to be uniform, as incomprehensible and monotonous as a banal bar code. The only clue giving us a chance to trace the individual is, in the end, the name that explicitly figures at the bottom of each canvas. In the 1970’s conceptual artists tried to create an objective form of art by integrating scientific language in their catalogues. While revealing profound individual intimacy the works of Xavier Moehr access irrefutable objectiveness, stripped of all artifice. Fabienne Fulcheri, trad :V.Blondel |