Dérives, Group Show
03/09 - 26/10/2024
MANIFESTA
6 rue Pizay, 69001, Lyon
Paris Photo
07/10 - 10/10/2024
Grand Palais, Paris
With "3600 secondes de lumière" Thibault Brunet captures the ephemeral beauty of clouds by utilizing a virtual space created in a video game. He observes the effect of the passage of time on the colors of the skies by creating a cycle of virtual sunrise and sunset. He creates a series of 3D-modeled cloud portraits, illuminated by this virtual sun, taking on different hues depending on the time of day. Thibault Brunet thus compiles a catalog of clouds, a typology of their shapes and changing colors.
The images created by this project blur the distinction between painting and photography. The clouds appear to us as paintings. As we approach, we realize that these images are simulacra created by a video game engine.
Building on his explorations of virtual and modeled reality, Thibault Brunet produced Territoires circonscrits, a series of photographs taken on the coastline of the North of France and of Brittany. The Leica Geosystems firm, which took part in the project, provided Thibault with a three-dimensional scanner (ScanStation) enabling him to film his environment at 360 degrees thanks to a cluster of points transposed into volumes. Rather than merely creating a copy, Thibault Brunet used this state-of-the-art equipment to lay the foundations of a space that one might think of as a drawing. Reality, as filtered by the camera, gave birth to a gradually fading distorted and fantastic universe.
Stone Books brings together three exceptional works, reflecting Thibault Brunet's fascination with an insurmountable natural world with which he attempts to establish a physical connection.
The sculpted edges of the books precisely replicate the reliefs of the cliffs at Ault (Baie de Somme), Cap Gris-Nez (Nord Pas-de-Calais), and the Clues de Barles (Alpes de Haute Provence), spread across thousands of pages.
In this way, Thibault Brunet continues his mission of recording the landscape with an inventory-like approach, a futile attempt to scan the world's boundaries. Since 2014, he has captured French landscapes using laser detection technology.
It is within the Google Earth database that Thibault Brunet extracts architectures to recontextualize them in delicately colored spaces. He continues his international project, which began in 2014, with representations of gas stations, whose recurrence in both the history of painting and photography is well known, acting as a testament to an architecture that is disappearing.
Fragile is a four-handed creation combining images and musical composition. Thibault Brunet and Serge Teyssot-Gay, composer and guitarist, come together to create a hybrid work as part of a carte blanche granted by the Festival Les Suds in Arles, the National School of Photography, and the Marseille History Museum, echoing the exhibition 'Rue du Musée, musée de la Rue.' Viewed in 3D, the city of Marseille sketches a perception of reality with its solid forms, delicate lines, and gaps... like the distorted sounds of the guitar that accompany this eclectic universe.
The Black Boxes series was born out of a strange feeling – that of being a voyeur and critic of the lurid excitement procured by an algorithmic aesthetic devoid of ethical considerations. Thibault Brunet created the shots in the series using YouTube videos, keeping only those that came from the press, which he then converted into JPEG, and modeled in 3D.
The software's "black box" encoded reality into figures and turned the ruins of Aleppo and Damascus into a model world – somewhere between a video game and a museographic restitution. Paradoxically, simulation simultaneously derealized and embodied the miniatures. The object seemed to be delineated and circumscribed by a physical body whose sand-coloured bricks and grey-blue concrete blocks are reminiscent of bruised skin. The eery physicality of these membranes – closed in on themselves as they are – returned them their black box function while preserving the memory of the disasters of the war...
With "typologie du virtuel" (typology of the virtual), Thibault Brunet set about to explore the French territory using Google Earth.
The images in this series were taken from buildings located in rurban areas that had been modeled in 3D by GE users. Shopping centres, social housing and the high-rise buildings of large commercial firms shaped global architectural typology that is completely disconnected from the territory itself. The artist anchored them into a specific space and time by adding a drop shadow defined according to the day and time of their construction. The context is the shadow, creating a space for projection which disappears into a mist that the artist compares to a "digital cloud" from which his buildings seem to emerge like pop-ups.
"Minecraft Explorer" is a virtual scientific exploration mission, composed of researchers (CNRS, IGN, INRA), mediators, an illustrator, an author, and a photographer. This performance began in January 2021, with interventions regularly broadcast live on social media. Together, we explore and experiment with the infinite potential of this ever-evolving immaterial universe.
The Vice City series is evidence of the relationship between Thibault Brunet's photography work and digital creation. Removing himself from the gamer's playful and hyperactive status, Thibault let his avatar wander through the virtual world capturing moments of beauty, like a modern vagabond. The beauty of urban poetica in deserted lands is an invitation to a contemplative gaze.
Questioning the in-between and ambiguity, Thibault Brunet created hybrid images, between artifice and reality, photography and pictorial tradition. Thus, the artist disrupted the nature and role of the video game by giving this popular medium artistic and historical depth.
Thibault Brunet is a French artist born in 1982, he is represented by the Binome gallery in Paris and by Heinzer Reszler in Lausanne. His work plays with photography's coded genres and questions our relationship to cyberspace in a society that is really a cyber world.
A 2007 graduate of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, Thibault Brunet had made a name for himself as early as 2008 thanks to the landscape studies he made inside video games. For several years, he travelled through these virtual worlds with his avatar's camera. His work attracted the attention of several institutions: Winner [reGeneration2] of the Musée de l'Élysée (2011), FOAM Talent 2013, Institut d'Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne (2013), Prix du public Sciences Po for contemporary art (2014), Prix Coup de cœur Art-Collector - Jeune Création (2014), Winner of Carte Blanche PMU /Le Bal (2014), Winner of the Photo London John Kobal Residency award (2016), Winner of Étant donnés (2017).
In 2014, Thibault joined the collective project France (s) Territoires Liquides with a project cataloguing the architecture of the French territory on Google Earth. This work, presented during the 2015 Lyon Biennale, was shown at the BnF in 2018 in the Paysages Français exhibition.
Lately, Thibault has favoured a new approach and is now working on the digitization of the real world thanks to a partnership with Leica Geosystems and with the support of the Institut Français (Étant donné residency) and the John Kobal Residency.
Between 2017 and 2019, he was featured in numerous international exhibitions in Israel, Cameroon, Switzerland, Germany and China, including exhibitions of his project "Territoires circonscrits" (photographs and video) at the Musée des Beaux-arts Le Locle in 2017 and the Cercle Cité in 2018.
He recently won the ADAGP x Mad Artist's Book prize with his latest project, Ault un livre sculpture, produced with the editor Mille Cailloux.