Jean-Vincent Simonet

Spider-tactics is the first chapter in an ongoing project entitled Lures. Jean-Vincent Simonet, a graduate of ECAL (Lausanne), works with inks in his family's four-generation printing business. In the tradition of the "colorists", the artist has developed an experimental photographic printing technique that enables him to question the seductive power of synthetic colors (the fascinating history of these colors is recounted by Carolyn L. Kane in Chromatic Algorithms). The subjects photographed are brightly colored decoys imitating nature. Between shooting a subject with a digital camera and running it through the inkjet printer, only a few re-frames are required. It's afterwards that the artist operates, when the plastic paper used emerges impregnated with still-moist inks. The practice is similar to that of a silver retoucher. No computer work, everything takes place in close contact with the work, arbitrated by the passage of time and the weather. The silver printer retouches with chemistry, whereas Jean-Vincent Simonet uses water and gravity (to obtain the drips) as well as gestures borrowed from painters (rubbing, erasing with a brush, spreading with a brush, with the finger, etc.). The artist crushes the lines, drowns the pixels, subtracts the layers, making the underlying colors, the synthetic colors, appear. By X-raying photography, he forbids himself any reproducibility, creating only unique works. He resolutely distances himself from the principle of reality generally attributed to this medium.