From ancient myths to contemporary psychoanalytical theories, mirror images generate a fascination that surpasses a mere interest in bodily appearance. In point of fact, mirrors stimulate some of our earliest existential reflections: could there be an inverted world behind that surface? The illusion of spatial depth in a mirror image plunges us into our psychic interiority and structures a specific sensitivity to the mysteries of life. However, in the digital era, mirrors have been tainted by the superficiality of selfies. The screens of digital gadgets block the dive into the inner self and its exploration.

Problematizing the flatness of digital screens, Pascal Dombis’s large lenticular prints are hybrids of a mirror and a screen. The tactile quality of the optical lens likens it to a screen but, like a mirror, the lens reacts to the movements of the viewer’s body and suggests an intriguing world of shadows trapped in a shallow space behind the surface. The playful chromatic invitation sent by Dombis’s works turns out to be a demand for reflection on the phantasmagoria of the technological future, in works that address the shadow of contemporaneity, as if the uncanny side of digital society is hiding behind the colorful surface. Thus, Pascal Dombis’s works can be read as variations of a “post-digital mirror,” an expression that lends itself to a series begun in 2006 that, as in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, put contemporary Alices in contact with the other side of cybernetic superficiality, a disturbing space where our globalized techno-utopianism is inverted.

When Theo van Doesburg published the Concrete Art manifesto in 1930,¹ he stated that an artwork of universal character should be fully developed before the work is actually produced. Geometry would be the basis for composing images meaningful to any human being. Concretism, an expression of the European Constructivist avant-garde, flourished late in Latin America, in the 1950s, where it was transformed by the local idiom into propositions that, from mathematical rationality, fostered interest in movement, the creative power of modular repetition, and the use of technology. These concepts were present in works by key artists in the history of contemporary Latin American art, such as Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Luiz Sacilotto, and Abraham Palatnik, among many others.

In Brazil, the Constructivist tendencies served as a counterpoint to art that had been primarily focused on representing scenes of Brazilian culture and the then markedly agrarian economic infrastructure. Until the 1940s, the formal language was derived from European avant-gardes, but the theme of the works was predominantly national. In this context, as occurred in other Latin American nations, geometric abstraction responded to the country’s aspirations for development and industrialization. Second generation European Concretism, especially linked to the Ulm School, fostered Brazilian artists’ adherence to a project of social transformation through the integration of art into society. From the late 1950s, after almost a decade of Concretist practice, the Constructivist maxim of inserting art into life — initially established through dialogue with industry and modernist architecture — expanded into the amalgamation of art and life through an emphasis on behavioral deconditioning in the radical propositions, often referred to as anti-art, of artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, defined by critic Mario Pedrosa as “the experimental exercise of freedom.” Could there be, today, a resumption of the relationship between art and technology that integrates deconditioning and freedom?

If it is possible to understand the development of concrete art as a large decentralized network where the nodes are works extending edges to other nodes in time and space — such as Neoconcretism, kinetic art, electronic art — Dombis’s production appears connected with both the early experiments of Concrete Art that strictly followed Theo van Doesburg’s manifesto and with the art (or anti-art) of artists who, amplifying the network, launched indispensable nodes towards social critique.

In the early 1990s, Pascal Dombis began working with algorithmic coding, a technique that, as defended by van Doesburg’s manifesto, generated a work conceived entirely “by the mind before its execution.” Once the computational code was written, its execution generated the work either from combinations and permutations of fractal geometry structures or from the simplicity of a line, the basic form of geometric rationality. Nowadays, Dombis’s work can be understood as an experiment in replacing the line with the basic unit of contemporary rationality: information.

As articulated by philosopher Byung-Chul Han, information is the pure positivity of a smooth flow. Positivity here is defined as an outlook on life devoid of criticality, to the point of extreme anesthetic comfort. Without any element of otherness, information flows through time without event or destiny, producing a narcissistic imprisonment that rejects the Other and at all costs distances itself from dialectically transformative negativity.

Pascal Dombis’s works suggest resistance to informational superficiality by hindering the smooth, accident-free flow of information. In the series Crackography (2018–19), the artist accumulates layers of images related to the word “crack” in Google searches. The result is a metallic surface that fractures the familiarity of the image stream. Likewise, Post-Digital Blue (2013–20) breaks the conventional idea of peace and calm associated with the color of the sky by reacting with unexpected shadows to the viewer’s body movements. The blue monochrome also invokes Aleksandr Rodchenko’s declaration of the end of painting, concerning his monochromatic triptych of 1921: “I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue, and yellow. I affirmed: it’s all over.²” Painting, nevertheless, persists. As argued by Hélio Oiticica, the real death of painting would be keeping it as it has always been. Killing it is, in fact, a means to ensure its continuity, the condition for the emergence of new semantic and cognitive possibilities for art, beyond what has so far been understood as art. “It’s all over” would thus be one of the terms of a dialectical synthesis.

Pointing to a new beginning, in 2024 Pascal Dombis stated that “The End of Art Is Not the End” on a large site-specific wall at DAN Galeria, Brazil, assembled with images related to a Google search about the end of art. Thousands of images are printed in interlaced mode after being sliced into fine strips, and the viewer is invited to use a lenticular sheet to undo the informational chaos. It then becomes possible to focus on small fragments of the digital collage and to see just how minuscule the deciphered piece is in relation to the whole. The fractal geometry that defines the harmonious isomorphism between the part and the whole in natural forms (a rock resembling a mountain, a branch resembling a tree) becomes simply repetition ad nauseam when applied to the content of the digital network. So, what would a new beginning be? Meta-Aura (2015) offers relief from the accumulation of positivity on the Internet, providing a respectful relationship with the mysterious image, once again produced with the line, from an algorithmic loop. A web of lines on paper turns dense at the edges while keeping the center perplexingly empty. The network in Meta-Aura is no longer the place of Internet positivity but an intriguing rhizome. Although Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura refers to what is unreproducible, Meta-Aura becomes, in relation to the repetitive content retrieved by Google Images, a chance to share the hic et nunc of Art History, with its announcements of ends and its jubilant new beginnings.

In the rhizome of works that, over the centuries, have announced a new life for art, a new beginning can be a line stretched from a node in the past towards an unknown future. Examining the production of Brazilian Concretist artists, who manually constructed their compositions but also through an algorithmic process of rule repetition, we detect a surprising kinship with the more complex compositions of Pascal Dombis. According to Waldemar Cordeiro: “Concrete art, what did it do? It digitized an image, [it dealt with] numbers, surfaces with quantities, established relationships between these quantities, programmed the paintings. The execution was artisanal only because no industry wanted to do it […] But intentionally, our paintings were programmed. Concrete paintings could have been produced by a printing press, by an industry, by a machine, because they were based on a numerical program — mind you — like digitized art. Evidently, the programming of concrete art is much more elementary than programming with a computer […] but the roots are there.”

Decades after the developmental wave in Latin America and the beginning of the relationship between art and technology in Brazil, Pascal Dombis’s works subtly critique a society derived from the uncontrolled proliferation of digital technology, which masks the effects of globalization under the guise of universality. Like unsettling mirrors, his works reflect the past of art history, engage with contemporary narcissism closed in on itself, and crack into the future by disturbing the consensuality of “technology for technology’s sake.” Reflection becomes less a mere mirror and more of a meditation on our ambivalent position towards a digitalized future: attraction and fear.

[1] Published in French with the title “Base de la peinture concrète” in the group’s review Art Concret (p. 1).
[2] Bois Yve-Alain, “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990), p. 238.

Pascal Dombis. Post-Digital, Skira, 2025, p. 110 to 114, text by Paula Braga