Opening on 6th June, 2024, Pascal Dombis’ first solo exhibition in UK offers an opportunity to explore a protean and critical oeuvre that engages with the universal notion of time through the use of digital flows as the raw material of his work.

Highlight in Pascal Dombis’ exhibition is an interactive wall installation The End Of Art Is Not The End, part of a series of pieces among the most iconic in Pascal Dombis’ work. This new piece questions the issue of the multiple “ends of …” that characterizes our current times: the end of world, the end of man, the end of civilization, the end of politics, the end of history and, of course, the end of art. The international narrative is written on Google’s servers, which Pascal Dombis scans while repeating his image searches. With a few keywords on “ends of …”, he obtains large quantities of visuals, more than 20,000 images for that piece. This constitutes the database material. He assembles these icons of our times next to each other as well as above each other, obtaining a texture whose depth confers a certain pictorial quality. To decipher them one by one, you need to be equipped with a lenticular sheet to draw them out of the invisible. Thus, the gaze must be accompanied by the gesture required to focus, as in photography. Consequently, there are as many stories as there are members of the public who determine, by moving around, the montage of the image. And here, the cinema – the art of time par excellence – comes to mind. The sentence that can be made out on the surface of the installation comes from an aphorism of the painter of Radical Painting, Ad Reinhardt, «The End of Art is not the End»(1).

(1) Excerpt from “Art-as-Art Dogma, Part III,” published in March 1965, Art News, New York.