"Salty Stone": A Subrealist Reinterpretation of Van Gogh's Portrait of Augustine Roulin in the Context of Digital and Physical Hybridity

Conceptual Synthesis: Between Abstraction, History, and Digital Transfiguration

My reinterpretation of the Portrait of Augustine Roulin under the title "Salty Stone" draws on multiple, intertwined conceptual layers:

The Allegory of Salt as Historical and Economic Memory

Salt, once a currency and a marker of wealth, becomes a metaphor for the sedimentation of cultural values: how meaning accumulates like salt deposits on stone, shaped by time and erosion.

The "taste of salt" left by the sea suggests both preservation (salt historically preventing decay) and transformation (waves wearing away stone). This duality reflects Van Gogh's own tension between permanence and flux, structure and dissolution.

Abstract Expressionism as a Contemporary Ritual

The work evokes the gestural abstraction of mid-20th-century Expressionism, but transposed through a digital prism. The brushstrokes (acrylic on canvas) are photographed, cut out, and digitally recomposed, creating a palimpsest where the "artist's hand" is both preserved and destabilized.

The minimalist stop-motion animation introduces a temporal dimension, echoing the slow geological time of salt crystallization, as a counterpoint to the immediacy of digital culture.

Subrealism and Subgnosticism

My approach to subgnosticism clearly transfigures the cryptic layering of meaning: the "stone" is both the face of Augustine (a classical portrait dissolved into abstraction) and a symbol of Gnostic panspermia—the idea that knowledge, like salt, disperses and accumulates over time. The technique of digital decoupage functions as a deconstructive ritual, erasing the "aura" (Benjamin) of the original while incorporating new mythologies, mirroring Derrida's archival violence, where reinterpretation crushes the source.

Philosophical Anchors: Posthumanism, Deconstruction, and the End of Grand Narratives

Lyotard and the Fragmented Myth

The work rejects a singular "truth" of Van Gogh's portrait, proposing instead a micronarrative—salt as a fleeting and granular metaphor for value. This is in keeping with Lyotard's postmodern condition, where grand narratives (such as the canon of art history) dissolve into localized and subjective truths.

Haraway's Cyborg and the Digital Hybrid

The physical-digital hybrid medium literalizes Haraway's "cyborg ontology." The canvas is no longer a stable object, but a node in a network of reproductions (digitized painting, animated fragments), challenging the original/copy dichotomy.

Derrida's Trace and the Palimpsest

The hand-cut layers effect a spectral erasure: Van Gogh's features are no longer visible, but subsumed into new abstract allegories. This mirrors Derrida's trace, where meaning is perpetually deferred by reinterpretation.

Xanthopsia as Post-Digital Vision

The yellow-dominated palette (xanthopsia) refracts Van Gogh's hallucinatory luminosity into a posthuman optimism—a utopian glow emerging from the "darkness" of algorithmic alienation.

The eroded but enduring "stone" motif echoes Van Gogh's legacy: a cultural touchstone worn by reinterpretation, yet still abrasive in its emotional resonance. Conclusion: A Technognostic Ritual

"Salted Stone" is not a simple homage, but a transfigurative act—a subrealist alchemy where:

Salt = the data of history, the residue of meaning.

Stone = the classical artwork, now porous and changing.

Digital animation = the algorithmic tides that reshape perception.

I propose art as a knot where past and future, analog and digital, sacred and algorithmic intertwine—a new myth for an era of flux. The work becomes a slow ritual echoing the history of contemporary art.

Tribute to Van Gogh : « Portrait of Madame Augustine Roulin  »

Original at : Sammlung Oskar Reinhart «Am Römerholz»

3840 x 2160 px / 4k MP4 / 116 Mo / 8 fps / 1/1 édition

On @objktcom :
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