A color in art is not a color.
Colorlessness in art is not colorlessness.
Ad Reinhardt, Art-as-Art Dogma, 1965

This aphorism by the abstract artist Ad Reinhardt could almost have been coined for Pascal Dombis’s Post-Digital series. The Post-Digital Mirrors and Post-Digital Surfaces initially present viewers with a monochrome surface, but as soon as you move, an entire world of colors opens up, only to vanish again. We need to stand in the right position to summon it back, just like Ad Reinhardt’s Ultimate Paintings. A mystery is unveiled as we watch, unsettling our perception and our senses: why is there a presence rather than a void? The void is the canvas swept clean of all clichés,¹ the canvas that ushers in the chaos needed to create a brand new work of art.

We have known since Paul Cézanne that the painter must dig down to the world’s deep strata. Painting means sweeping the canvas clean of clichés to find new seeds of creation. For Cézanne,² the act of painting calls for a catastrophe to bring out color: “To paint a landscape well, I must first discover its deep geological strata. Just think, the history of the world began on the day two atoms collided, two eddies, two chemical dances came together. I see them rise, these great rainbows, these cosmic prisms, this dawn of our selves over the void; I steep myself in it by reading Lucretius. […] A keen sense of hues nags at me. I feel myself colored by all the hues of infinity. […] The deep geological strata, the preparatory work, the world of the sketch cave in, collapsing like a catastrophe. A cataclysm has swept it away and regenerated it. […] All that remains are colors, and in them, light […].”

Cézanne’s words uncannily echo the various series by Pascal Dombis, who may have used the same process to draw color forth from his work. It is at the heart of the Post-Digital Mirrors. Pascal Dombis no longer uses brushes, but his relationship with color and shape are nonetheless akin to those of a painter. You need to see him handling his materials, then “seeking out color,” he tells me, to understand. Since the Concrete Art Manifesto, proclaiming that a work of art had to be entirely forged in the mind before it was produced, and subsequently since Auguste Herbin, Victor Vasarely, Ellsworth Kelly and Sol LeWitt, abstract artists have built systems to shape their pictorial space and establish an order for its elements. They have turned code into pictorial reality, using an analysis of events to impose order on chaos and avoid wearing out their model through repetition. Pascal Dombis uses technology to the same end. He creates an algorithmic loop of red, blue, yellow, black, and white. Various settings let him adjust the color. One series may contain just white and blue, another more red and less yellow. The combinations are infinite. The aim is to create a form from the void, seeking out the right measure and balance. The grid means some colors are recreated ex nihilo in the loop: for instance, the proximity of blue and yellow generates green, a color not included in the initial code. The settings are then applied to lenticular panels consisting of a network of vertical lenses that trigger movement depending on the viewer’s position. They are perfected and calibrated ahead of printing and, where Pascal Dombis identifies a shape, he tries to amplify it and study how it moves. This creates a dance between the artist and his work.

The process may be deliberate, but the outcome is random. When Pascal Dombis first started working with algorithms, his choice of colors was programmatic: he could iterate a loop to excess, obtaining an entirely black result if the program did not use color. For the past decade or so, his choice has become more subjective, as colors missing from his algorithms bloom on the surface. For instance, programming blue, black, and white creates cyan and turquoise. There are multiple combinations. Depending on the colors coded, new palettes unfold, influencing our perception.

The effects produced by the Post-Digital Mirrors are unsettling, and it is tempting to think they are generated by our bodies, as the colors are similar to thermal imaging. Yet this is misleading: the artist alone is responsible for the colors, while the viewer activates their appearance. The work is devoid of drawing and outlines, consisting solely of colors in relation to each other, triggering a wide range of effects, by turns ethereal, nebulous, thermal, and atmospheric. All at once, the program and the machine seem very distant, conjuring up precursors of abstract art like J.M.W. Turner and German Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich and the way they captured the sky. The reference becomes clear when we consider their interest in Goethe’s theory of colors, based on the polarity of light (yellow) and dark (blue), accounting first and foremost for the emotional resonance of color. Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1808-10) clearly demonstrates this effect and the emotions stirred by colors — especially blue, an inexhaustible source of fascination that Pascal Dombis has succumbed to like so many painters and poets: as Gaston Bachelard wrote in Air and Dreams, “First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.” Color blooms from the void, or from zero, since these are binary codes

For J.M.W. Turner, generating color meant abolishing form. The 1843 painting Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis is a case in point. Most of the composition is taken up by a ball of fire within which spins a bright halo of golden yellow flame. Form fades away: the deluge is needed to bring forth light and color. This brings us back to Cézanne’s seed of chaos. Pascal Dombis’s programs use color to ward off catastrophe. In this orderly chaos, the artist takes up the role of demiurge, creating a world not of objects, but of color. The aim is not the figurative but openness to color — a rare stance given that, as Michel Pastoureau often explains, color has all too often been overlooked in art history, including the history of painting. Few artists since Albers, Rothko, Reinhardt, Klein, Richter and LeWitt, to quote a few examples, have taken an interest in it. Trying to think of French artists who center their creative practice around color, few names come to mind.³

Pascal Dombis’s orderly chaos may, in the final analysis, invent a new optical code. By applying binary choices to units laden with meaning — red, blue, yellow, black, and white — he meets the definition of a pure optical space where the artist’s hand tends to give way to the finger, a digital space defined by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze to describe Auguste Herbin’s creative lexis. Yet Pascal Dombis’s space is not solely digital; it is also pictorial. His code generates unpredictable, unstable, dynamic visual forms with multiple effects: they contract and shrink, using color to create a poiesis of time and space. Between two and three dimensions there exists an infinite possibility of shades, like the fleeting green flash that sometimes occurs at sunrise or sunset. This in-between space is where the works in the Post-Digital series reside. Through them, Pascal Dombis abolishes the boundary between the digital and the pictorial, inventing a code that places his art in the abstract movement and its major colorists.

[1] I use the term cliché in its Deleuzian sense. Deleuze defined clichés as the data present in the background of a blank canvas, inhibiting the emergence of different new perspectives.
[2] In an interview with Dr. Gasquet
[3] One exception is Auguste Herbin, described by Gilles Deleuze as the only abstract colorist. More recent examples include Bernard Frieze and Pierre Mabille.

Pascal Dombis. Post-Digital, Skira, 2025, p. 28 to 31, essay by Céline Berchiche, translated by Susan Pickford