Point of view is a recurrent issue in art; it is central to the creative practice of Pascal Dombis, borne out in his abundant use of lenticular effects that let viewers interact with his works. Italian artists of the 16th century were familiar with the tabula scalata technique, consisting of two images cut into long, thin strips and assembled alternately, each revealed in turn depending on the viewer’s position, while similar “turning pictures” were popular in 17th-century England. Not until the age of mechanical reproduction of works of art, theorized by Walter Benjamin, did lenticular printing lead to the industrial-scale production of works that featured multiple images, and therefore multiple points of view, within a single artefact. Andy Warhol’s Rain Machine, a wall of lenticular panels of daisies displayed behind a curtain of indoor “rain,” is one prominent 20th-century example of the technique. The context of its creation at the 1970 world fair in Osaka, is particularly interesting: Andy Warhol was invited to join a program set up by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to build bridges between art and technology, which saw him collaborate with an American firm specializing in lenticular technology. The following years saw the emergence of a creative practice at the juncture between art and tech. This is where Pascal Dombis’s own oeuvre stands.

Though lenticular technology made steady industrial progress over the intervening decades, it proved of little interest to artists until the 2000s, when Pascal Dombis began to make this area his own. The technique led him to explore the sublime in his multiple Post-Digital series, including the Post-Digital Mirrors begun in 2006, featuring mirrors that do not act as mirrors per se, but reflect infinite variations of their surroundings. Visitors are not entirely sure of what they see, their gaze gliding across the surface of reflections that the artist never truly controls, such is the accumulation of layered, intertwined images. A lack of control is key to Pascal Dombis’s art, giving rise to a heady sense of bedazzlement for viewers as the artworks prompt them to move, as if to test the full capacities of each piece. Each new series lets Pascal Dombis tirelessly, exhaustively explore the media and materials of his own art. Two people standing in front of his Post-Digital Mirrors or Post-Digital Surfaces will never see the same thing at the same time, making perception a crucial issue in his art. Moving from mirrors to monochromes, Pascal Dombis is heir to an artistic legacy whose influence is everywhere in his oeuvre. The blues of Post-Digital Blue inevitably gesture to Yves Klein’s IKB¹ in the infinite depth of its intertwining hues. In assembling his mirrors as monochromes or banded or hatched gradations of color (a recurrent motif beloved of Rosalind Krauss), Pascal Dombis triggers confrontations with uncertain passages that could be interpreted as gaps in time and space that swallow up a flux of vivid colors. His motor-driven Spin Machine tells of his deep interest in machines that contrast with the stillness of onlookers, bearing witness to the ineffable flows that symbolize the constant activity of the particles making up our world. In the monumental site-specific installation Aurora (Loophole in the Sky), lenticular panels in the colors of the visible and invisible spectrums form an oculus encircling a ring of Bangkok sky. It conjures up Tiepolo frescos and the immoderate urge to gaze skywards without diminishing our bodies, softening the burden of our flesh with extravagant perspectives. Each separate panel in the oculus is fixed in place, yet together they generate a circulating flux of color that draws us up towards the sublime.

Specific letters, words and phrases regularly crop up in Pascal Dombis’s works of art and the process of their creation. The word “control” is sometimes abbreviated CTRL: the artist likes to establish rules for his creations to elude. He thereby evokes our relationship with the interfaces that often escape us all, including AI researchers who are at peace with not seeing every detail of how their algorithms work, sometimes comparing them to black boxes. The words that add complexity to his work arrive from above, inside, behind, or as cut-outs, and generally refer to art or literature. The recurring sentences include Ad Reinhardt’s 1966 “The end of art is not the end.” A premonition, perhaps, of the possibility of an after that may not — or may no longer — concern us? The End Of Art Is Not The End (2024) is also the title of one of Pascal Dombis’s interactive installations teasing out the textural noise in the countless images of lenticular prints on display. He has spent several years developing his series of printed walls. The sentence that lends its name to the installation The Invisible Generation, presented in Paris in 2021, is barely perceptible under the surface of the work; it is borrowed from William Burroughs, known for his use of cut-ups. The technique, initially adopted in literature, aims to generate meaning from haphazard assemblages of words or sentence fragments. Text is an integral part of the process creating Pascal Dombis’s monumental fresco installations. He regularly, unflaggingly repeats the same Google text searches to collect different images in response, the aim being to trigger a kind of truth in numbers. Fundamentally, this is the same process as used by data scientists. The sets of image data he obtains let him cover entire walls, playing with various possibilities. The extremely dense texture of the display reflects the uninterrupted information flows circulating the globe or the cloud, from data center to data center. Visitors are then tasked with recovering fragments from the installations representing the whole, using lenticular lenses placed at their disposal. To extract images from the noise, they must find the correct angles with a rotating gesture, akin to a photographer adjusting a camera lens. The scattered narrative is intuited, waiting to be extricated and reassembled, like a film edit. Up close, the depth of field seems limitless, and visitors must step right back to read Ad Reinhardt’s sentence. It is one way of asserting that without humans, there is no art.

Pascal Dombis is equally captivated by ends — in art as in writing — and by beginnings. He gestures to the negative hands of cave art in the series Self-Portrait (Post-Digital Burn), burning his own handprint onto a lenticular surface with infinite variations of color. It is a radical, almost iconoclastic move, but one that adds rather than subtracts an image. The work evokes the debate on the role of hands in art, dismissed by da Vinci’s claim that “La pittura è cosa mentale”. Technology has always driven advances in art techniques. Pascal Dombis relentlessly turns to the technologies of his own time to explore the world they are transforming

[1] IKB stands for International Klein Blue, a color process developed and trademarked by Yves Klein.

Pascal Dombis. Post-Digital, Skira, 2025, p. 78 to 81, essay by Dominique Moulon, translated by Susan Pickford