A subrealist and hybrid reinterpretation of Van Gogh's "The Sower II" (1888)

1. Philosophical and Artistic Conceptualization

« Le Tramage » operates a double abstraction: formal (through digital and pictorial fragmentation) and symbolic (through the transposition of the agricultural gesture into a technological gesture). Van Gogh's sower, a reinterpretation of Millet's sower, an archetype of human labor and natural cyclicality, here becomes an allegory of digital flows and contemporary production mechanisms. Screening, a printing technique based on RGB (red, green, blue) additive synthesis, is elevated to a structuring metaphor: it represents the invisible grid that governs our screens, our economies, and our perceptions. This reinterpretation goes beyond simple homage to question the relationship between organicity and artificiality, between the physical and the digital fields. 2. Technical Hybridity and Subrealist Language

The work combines:

- Acrylic paint on canvas: expressionist gestures, impasto, and textures reminiscent of the materiality of Van Gogh's art, but disrupted by digital overlays.

Subrealism emerges from this tension: it is neither about representing reality nor abolishing it, but about revealing the technological substrates that mediate it (screens, algorithms, networks).

3. Allegory of Screening: Modern Subsistence and Digital Hypnosis

The sower no longer sows seeds but pixels—units of light and information. His gesture symbolizes:

- Digital production: as fields fed workers, data feeds the contemporary economy.

- Hypnotic consumption: RGB screening becomes the pulsating rhythm of screens, a cadence as captivating as the furrows of the harvest.

- Van Gogh's duality updated: the tensions between light and darkness, between organicity (the canvas) and artificiality (the pixel), echo the harmonies and conflicts dear to Van Gogh.

4. Integration into the digital subculture and the Xanthopsia collection

Xanthopsia (yellow vision)—an altered perception where the world appears tinged with yellow—is interpreted here as a filtered utopia: the search for positivity in the excess of digital light. Van Gogh's yellow, a sunny and vibrant color, symbolizes both optimism and the sensory saturation of screens.

This piece is part of a hybrid aesthetic specific to digital subcultures (glitch art, pixel art, speculative realism), where the classical and the contemporary coexist without hierarchy.

5. Meditation on artistic reinvention

"Le Tramage" illustrates how modern techniques (digital, animation) do not erase the classical but recontextualize it. The painted gesture and the animated pixel interact to question:

- The persistence of the body in digital art (the painter's hand vs. the user's hand).

- The democratization of tools: just as Van Gogh used pigments that were innovative for his time, contemporary artists use digital technology to expand their visual language.

- Temporal transcendence: Van Gogh's work is reread through the prisms of cyberspace, demonstrating its capacity to generate infinite interpretations.

Conclusion

"Le Tramage" is a manifesto about art as a weaving process: between past and present, between grain of wheat and pixel, between human gesture and algorithm. It offers an active contemplation of our overlapping realities—agrarian and digital—and invites us to perceive, behind the flow of screens, the persistent furrows of humanity.

Le Tramage : Xanthopsia 161:

Tribute to Van Gogh : « Le semeur II »

Original at : Fondation L. Jäggli-Hahnloser

 #treeskulltown digital art version :

3840 x 2160 px / 4K MP4 / 135 Mo / 11 fps / 1/1 édition