The university libraries and the artist Jean Maréjano are pleased to offer you the exhibition:

NAP.Non analog painting
a new paradigm?
2 September - 31 October 2024
BU Saint-Denis Sciences
Open to everyone

What is a non-analog painting? ... would it be a digital painting? ... a tube from which zeros and ones would come out?? of what color(s)? it's incomprehensible! There are expressions that we use wrongly and without paying enough attention, especially when they become fashionable because of technological novelty... and when we use one of these words with its precise literal meaning out of necessity, no one understands us anymore because its use has become dull and its meaning has become a vague notion for too many of us... So let's start from the beginning!

First of all, let's not confuse painting with a picture. The latter is the finished object, the paint is the material used to create it. We could just as easily have "a watercolor" as "an oil" or "a pastel" in this painting... But in addition, we must understand "a pictorial work created in" watercolor, oil or pastel... using a brush or a pastel stick. The brush, or the stick, are the tools used by the artist. Here we are: computing, which uses digital language, can very well, these days, be an artist's working tool. This exhibition, for example, is material proof of this: all the works were created exclusively using computing.

The NAP It is first an acronym intended to attract attention while making people smile. It has just allowed the highlighting of a new technique at the service of artistic painting. We are no longer in conventional painting, but we are still in pictorial expression. Concretely, the artist uses this new tool in the form of software that he diverts from his
primary function to bend it to his requirements. For example, Photoshop is intended to retouch fashion photos, but the artist, by appropriating it, makes it a tool for creating paintings with a specific aesthetic. For the contemporary artist, the rendering of reality, which academicism advocated, is no longer the goal to be achieved. Heir to the impressionists, fauvists and others like Pollock, he ventures even further, the canons of aesthetics being today much other than the simple reproduction of reality.

In this context, digital technology plays its role as an aid by doing what it knows how to do and what man commands it to do. It serves the artist as it would anyone else who manipulates it; it has no initiative. The computer alone does nothing. Just because it performs the automatic tasks that man commands it to do does not mean that it would be an artist; it only performs its work as a "machine" by assisting the artist who knows how to call upon it. And in this, it does what nothing and no one else can do, because the artist uses it for what is specific to it. This reminds us that many painters have used specific tools: Van Gogh the painting knife, or Pollock a tin can with holes in it, to name but a few. Today, we are in a cooperation between man and this "machine" that is the computer tool, and without developing this theme excessively, we can recall that when an artist became aware of a "machine" capable of helping him, he used it, whether it was the "camera obscura" for Leonardo da Vinci who created his Tuscan landscapes, or the photographic view camera for Edgar Degas who brings us close to the dancers of the Opera by fixing their attitudes on stage or in the intimacy of the wings.

Jean Maréjano

Exhibition “NAP… Non analogic painting… a new paradigm?” by Jean Marejano
from August 26 to October 31, 2024
Saint-Denis Sciences University Library
Monday to Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 19 p.m. and Saturday from 12 p.m. to 17 p.m.
Free entry and open to all
Such. Home: 0262 93 86 04