(…) In this post-era, the machines that we were accustomed to blame for the errors they used to make have now become quite faultless. They have become less and less surprising or puzzling – that is to say, provided they are not in the hands of artists such as Pascal Dombis who revel in serendipity. He never knows beforehand, for instance, how the surfaces of his Post Digital Mirrors are to reflect the World. As a matter of fact, they do not reflect anything material but the accidents that the process never fails to get stuck into, when pushed to its limits. It could even be said that they do achieve the kind of silences that monochrome paintings achieve. The variability of the accidents taking place on the surfaces of his post digital mirrors makes them appear as folds, which sends us back to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and his interpretation of Leibnitz: “Chaos as such does not exist; it is an abstraction since it cannot be detached from a sieve/ a screen that makes something emerge (something rather than nothing)”. That “something” is precisely what evades the artist’s control and even, sometimes, the machines’. Its contours sometimes look like topographical curves indicating distances and exposing our determination to decipher what comes our way when we are in quest for the sublime.

Extract from “On Combinations at Work” by Dominique Moulon / More >