Like a painter, photographer Jean-Vincent Simonet reworks his photographs straight along with his fingers, making the ink bleed throughout the floor of still-wet picture paper. His fascinating works are on show till Could 10 in “1000 Milliards d’Pictures”, the exhibition of the Reiffers Artwork Initiatives Prize, in Paris.
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Publié le 29 april 2025. Modifié le 30 April 2025.
Interview with artist Jean-Vincent Simonet, exhibited at Reiffers Artwork Initiatives
Numéro artwork: How did you develop the pictures proven within the exhibition “1000 Milliards d’Images” at Reiffers Art Initiatives? One can’t fairly inform if they’re computer-generated or your individual images. Additionally they evoke portray.
Jean-Vincent Simonet: Their start line is digital pictures, which has all the time been my most popular medium. However I by no means take into account the pictures I take as an finish in themselves, they’re uncooked materials I later rework. For this exhibition, the unique photographs are photographs of equipment related, in a method or one other, to the printing business. I’ve a particular relationship with that world, as I come from a household of printers.
Simonet, The Arsenal (2025). Ink, oil pastel, and acrylic on aluminum sheet. View of the exhibition. Photograph: Aurélien Mole.
My observe, in addition to my private historical past, are tied to a printing plant situated between Lyon and Grenoble. I’d already labored round this web site in earlier tasks, and for this present, I wished to take issues additional, to push my observe a bit—drawing not solely from the actual world however mixing these photographs of actual locations with digital collage, visible references from video video games, animation, drawing, or portray. I saturated the unique images, multiplied the objects throughout the photographs, altered the textures.
Simonet, Valve (2025). Ink, oil pastel, acrylic, and matte varnish on aluminum sheet. View of the exhibition. Photograph: Aurélien Mole.
So that you first manipulate the pictures digitally, then print them and rework them once more—this time by hand. Like a painter engaged on a canvas.
That’s the core of my observe. For the previous eight years, I’ve developed a particular method utilizing industrial artificial supplies not designed for inkjet printing. I run them by machines and, on output, the photographic floor is already reworked, nonetheless liquid, unfixed. It flows. It’s malleable, porous.
“The stress between the actual and the digital is central to my work.” Jean-Vincent Simonet
It’s my means of each digitally remodeling the picture beforehand after which reclaiming it bodily, refusing to rely solely on digital instruments. Like a painter, I come again with varied devices to change the floor. Typically I exploit water to erase layers, revealing decrease layers by subtractive methods. Typically I apply a primer that grips the ink.
Every time, it’s a wrestle with the picture’s texture. A want to flee the pixel and the photographic situation, to develop into a portray with out ever fairly being one. Within the darker works, thick chalk mixes with the still-wet ink, making a blur. Our notion is continually challenged: it appears photographic from a distance, however up shut it appears like airbrush portray… then you definitely spot fingerprint traces.
I’m not formally educated as a painter. My strategy is sort of instinctive and spontaneous. I crave contact, the tactile really feel of the floor. As soon as I’m glad with the consequence, I varnish the picture to repair it, although that doesn’t cease me from transforming and re-varnishing it. It’s a endless wrestle with the floor, simply as these photographs themselves attempt to transcend their situation as images and digital collages. The stress between the actual and the digital is central to my work.
Jean-Vincent Simonet’s works are on view till Could 10, 2025, on the “1000 Milliards d’Images” exhibition by Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris seventeenth.
