A Subrealist and Digital Reinterpretation of Van Gogh

This work is part of a philosophical and aesthetic approach deeply rooted in contemporary hybrid culture, where the physical and digital merge to create a new visual language. By revisiting Van Gogh's Vegetable Garden with Sunflowers, I propose a meditation on the oblivion of animist deities, those who once embodied gratitude for the sun and abundant harvests. This piece becomes an allegory of modern denial: our collective inability to honor the invisible sources of our sustenance.

Philosophical Concept: Sacred Memory and Subrealist Abstraction

The title itself, Sun Deity Facing Oblivion, poses a tension between sacredness and cultural amnesia. Subrealist abstraction—halfway between dream and reality—allows us to explore this duality: on the one hand, the celebration of harvests and light; on the other, the symbolic crumbling of ancient beliefs.

This approach is similar to Abstract Expressionism in its use of gesture, texture, and color as vehicles of raw emotion, but it differs in its narrative and symbolic anchoring. Here, yellow—the signature of Xanthopsia—is not just a color; it embodies a divine presence, a solar energy that contemporary society has chosen to forget, but which art revives.

Mixed media: Physical-digital hybridization as a language

My method combines:

- Acrylic paint on canvas: To anchor the work in materiality, a continuation of Van Gogh's impasto and gestural style, but interpreted through an energetic, almost chaotic abstraction, where the sunflowers become flamboyant entities, a kind of solar deity struggling against erasure. - Photography and stop-motion animation: The photographic capture freezes a transient state of the painting, while the digital animation—minimalist, at five frames per second—breathes a trembling life, like a memory that persists at the edge of consciousness.

This animation could suggest the movement of sunflowers turning toward the sun, or that of a solar deity attempting to manifest itself through the layers of oblivion; here, these deities are fixed to stipulate the rigidity of oblivion.

Digital subculture and reinterpretation of mythologies

In the hybrid aesthetic I develop, references from underground and digital cultures intersect: hand-glitch, iconographic reappropriation, and the ritualization of the creative process.

Digital technology is not used as a tool for perfection, but as a medium for fragmentation and re-symbolization. It allows us to reenact the myth through an aesthetic of instability—as if the solar deity emerged from intentional glitches and digital artifacts, reminding us that ancient beliefs persist as traces, as digital ghosts in our mental landscape.

The Xanthopsia Collection: A Visual Utopia in the Face of Nihilism

Xanthopsia—this yellow vision—here becomes a metaphor for art's ability to transform the gaze, to extract light from darkness. Like Van Gogh, who painted the starry night with an almost mystical fervor, I propose a reinterpretation where yellow is not only a color, but a state of consciousness.

This perceptual alteration raises the question: what if seeing the world in yellow were a way to re-enchant reality? To rediscover, if only in imagination, that gratitude toward the sun and the natural cycles that modernity has relegated to oblivion? Conclusion: A Tribute that Questions Legacy

Sun Divinity Facing Oblivion not only pays homage to Van Gogh; it extends his quest: capturing the invisible, giving form to emotion, and questioning the tensions between nature and humanity.

By hybridizing classical techniques and contemporary languages, I open a dialogue between eras—showing that fundamental questions (spirituality, gratitude, memory) persist, even if their forms evolve.

This work invites active contemplation: what if reconnecting with the forgotten sun divinities were a way of symbolically rediscovering our place, beyond any cult vocation—but simply finding a humble and grateful place in the cycle of life?

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This interpretation resonates with my desire to merge meditation and technical innovation, while honoring the spirit of Van Gogh: always on the border between the real and the visionary.

Tribute to Van Gogh: « Allotment with Sunflower »

Original at : Van Gogh Museum

3840 x 2160 px / 4k MP4 / 97,8 Mo / 5 fps / 1/1 édition

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