Mathieu Merlet-Briand
Digital native and coming from a farming family, Mathieu is interested in the influence of technology on the perception of our contemporary reality. He questions the internet materiality and its representations. It seeks to translate the spiritual experience of the internet user, the imagination of the surfer facing this endless flow of information.
In his projects recurrently emerges environmental issues (see his solo-show "#iceberg" 2017, "Environment" 2017) also, inspired by the reading of the philosophical essay of Ariel Kyrou "Google God" 2010, he questions this almost divine image associated with the giants of the web (see the exhibition "non-site" for the Dauphine Prize for Contemporary Art 2016).
He uses as medium the big datas. Through his algorithms that he develops, through recycling processes and analogies to nature, he shapes data flows in order to create tangible materializations. Abstractions, relics, crystallizations or fragment of the World Wide Web, his protean work materializes mainly in sculptures and multimedia installations.
Influenced as much by the history of abstraction, the artists of Land Art, as the New Realists, his creations are associated with Digital Culture, the movement Post-Digital or Post-Internet Art.
Last update on 10-03-2023
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Featured Artworks
With his ethereal compositions, Mathieu Merlet-Briand explores internet materiality. In #DESERT, he gathers a database of online images depicting dunes of sand. Elements come together through the use of algorithms, bringing a myriad of pictures to inhabit his canvas. Hues of orange and yellow remind of the physical reality of the photographed subject. Meanwhile, elements come together through algorithms, bringing a myriad of pictures to inhabit the canvas. The fragments add up to form an abstract, bi-chromatic whole. While withdrawing from their initial matter, they show a weaving of relics from the world wide web.
#DESERT
2019
Still
With his ethereal compositions, Mathieu Merlet-Briand explores internet materiality. In #FOREST, he gathers a database of online images depicting the woods. Hues of green and yellow remind of the physical reality of the photographed subject. Meanwhile, elements come together through algorithms, bringing a myriad of pictures to inhabit the canvas. The fragments add up to form an abstract, bi-chromatic whole. While withdrawing from their initial matter, they show a weaving of relics from the world wide web.
#FOREST
2019
Still
Mathieu Merlet Briand is a French digital artist who utilises his work to illuminate the synthetic ways in which information is shaped, guided, and fragmented, especially in reference to nature and technology.
In this new work designed specifically for the Not Only RGB exhibition, the artist continues his physical New Nature series with Purple #Mineral, a virtual 3D sculpture depicting the abstracted form of a geometric amethyst crystal. As a sculpture in virtual space that requires the audience to fully experience it through their movement around the object, Purple #Mineral translates the multi-faceted beauty of precious stones, which have captured human attention for aeons, to the eternal platform of the digital world. In this way, Merlet Briand embraces a hybrid understanding of the natural world as both delicate and expansive space, mirroring the complexity and infinity of the digital realm in many of the same ways.
Purple #Mineral
2022
3D Model
The Foundry
Artist Talk: Mathieu Merlet Briand
30/11/22
Online
Special artist talk with Mathieu Merlet Briand about “Not Only RGB”, a group show curated by Chiara Braidotti and Sia Pineschi about the transposition of colour from the natural world into the realm of the digital.
Events
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Not Only RGB is a group show curated by Chiara Braidotti and Sia Pineschi. Supported by Decentraland DAO, Not Only RGB features works created by Kevin Abosch, Matt Kane, 38‰ (Mattia Cuttini and Luca Donno), Sarah Meyohas and Mathieu Merlet-Briand.
“Colours are a fundamental facet of how we perceive the outside world. Governed by the invisible laws of colour theory, they influence our emotional relationships to nature, from celestial bodies to distant horizons. But what happens when we try to translate these naturally occurring palettes to a man-made digital environment? Is it still possible to engineer the same complexity of feeling? Can they be used as tools to probe more deeply into the laws of nature?
Not Only RGB is meant to explore the transposition of colour from the natural world into the realm of the digital, using digital landscapes to investigate the fundamental laws that govern our emotional and physical relationships to colour.
From our own subjective perceptions to the external world around us, this exhibition is a journey from microcosm to macrocosm through colour in digital realms."
(Chiara Braidotti and Sia Pineschi, curators)