Jacques Perconte (b.1974, lives and works in Rotterdam and Paris) stands as a significant digital creation figure in France. From the shores of Normandy to the Alps' peaks, from the depths of Scottish Borders to the Dutch polders, he films the elements with passion. Perconte's formal universalism, seemingly a reference to landscape painting, is drawn from how he combines the natural world and images' technicality. A pioneering force in digital video since the 1990s, technology is never Perconte's subject — instead, ecology and Anthropocene are the contexts from which he draws inspiration. In Perconte's images, the technique is an environment that challenges our presumed separation from nature. Perconte's work navigates between cinemas, galleries, alternative exhibition spaces, and live performances. Taking on many different forms — linear film, generative film, performance, print, installation — his works result from continuous experimental research that challenges and pushes forward the capacities of the moving image.
Before the Collapse of Mont Blanc - Film, 16min, 2020. Dedicated to the eponymous Mont Blanc massif, the film is accompanied by the director Jacques Perconte's burning question of whether we happen to be the very last people who will ever have the chance to see MontBlanc's summit. It's all in response to the earth's rising temperatures, causing glaciers to melt at a rapid pace. Perconte's work is unique in the sense that in revealing the inner strength and pulsation of what is seen on screen, he combines plasticity that follows on the pictorial tradition inherited from painting and experimental film with documentary film rooted in a specific space. Film, 16 min, 2020 "Are we the very last to see the peaks of Mont Blanc? The heat of the summers and the mild winters have a lot to do with the rock falls, which have multiplied over the last twenty years. The mountains are collapsing. If this is a sign of climate change, it is also a sign of our attachment to the landscape, which we would like to classify as a heritage site. The Mont Blanc massif is not ours. The mountain is a state. It is a moment, it wasn't there millions of years ago, and it will change in any case. The problem here would be that of the speed of change. Because the equilibrium of these peaks defying the void, these glaciers' longevity is only our point of view. On the scale of the planet's motion, it's a vibration. Mountains are falling, and there's nothing we can do about it. And even if we have the means to rise to their height to admire them, surpass those inaccessible peaks where many explorers lost their lives trying to gain the privilege of overcoming them, the mountains will continue to fall as they continue to rise. If Mount Blanc falls, it also rises. "" In his works, Perconte achieves a synthesis in which he finds a response to dialectical tension between the modern concept of techne and physis. These digits of the algorithm are part of the artistic environment, which is tense but also balanced at the same time. J. Sarmiento Hinojosa https://www.jacquesperconte.com/oe?244
15000ft - Infinite film (generative video), single-channel, 2021 "You get the curious feeling that the mountains enclose you to keep you away from all the noise and cruelty of the world. "(1). Filmed while a private flight to Mont Blanc, this adventure to the summits offers us a rare view of many peaks threatened by the ice's disappearance that keeps them in balance. Carried away by the turbulent winds that prevent any uniform trajectory so close to the cliffs, the camera films according to the kinetic energy of the plane's movements. The images do not reflect well on what the heart and the imagination combine as energy to welcome the immensity of the view and the flight's magic. The impossibility of seeing the mountain seems to be overcome in the experience. But the images I bring back tell us that this challenge of technique against nature is thrown to the wind by the violence of the danger that lurks. In balance, the devices use all their strength to stabilise themselves; this paradoxical force is what remains on the screen. All these vectorial tensions that I was already releasing in Before the Collapse of Mont Blanc are released here, explored without time limits. The memory-images of this high-altitude flight without oxygen are intermingled in an infinite flow. Almost infinitely, the moments blend together to give new textures of the brutal beauty of these still snow-covered mountains.
1 John Ruskin, to George Richmond, 24 May 1849, Letters I, W 36, pp. 100-101. See also To His Father, 16 August 1851, W 36, p. 117: 'It is so strange to come back here again and again, and see the same flurries of snow on the crests of the needles. It is not surprising that the rocks remain unchanged. But the flurries of snow! "︎
This piece is an infinite film. It is a work that is generated as it is played. It is like a landscape that we visit regularly, and that changes over the days and seasons, whose colour and textures evolve with the light and time.
The images were shot in March 2019 during a flight to explore the Mont Blanc massif on board a light aircraft.
With the support of Centre Pompidou, Hors Pistes, https://www.jacquesperconte.com/oe?251
