At the heart of the Xanthopsia collection, my piece " Agitate Entropy" embodies a dialectic between order and chaos, between heritage and reinvention, revisiting Van Gogh's Bank of the Oise in Auvers. This work becomes a visual palimpsest where the layers of time, matter, and meaning overlap, interrogating artistic memory through subrealist abstraction and hybrid techniques.

1. Digital Archaeology and Mystical Palimpsest

- Physical layers (photographed canvas, acrylic, watercolor) evoke Van Gogh's tangible imprint, his tormented textures.

- Digital layers (stop-motion animation, simulated brushstrokes) translate a dynamic memory, a technological reincarnation of his gesture.

This process recalls Derrida's theory of the trace, where the artifact is never fixed but always being rewritten, a dialogue between the visible and the latent.

2. Entropy as an Allegory of Van Gogh's Duality

The title "Agitate Entropy" metaphorizes the tension between dissolution and regeneration, a key element in Van Gogh's work, where faded sunflowers coexist with vibrant skies. My digital animation, by recreating the movement of brushstrokes, transforms entropy (disorder) into creative energy: decomposition becomes choreography. This approach echoes Deleuze's philosophy, for whom art is a perpetual "becoming," a machine for capturing invisible forces.

3. Xanthopsia: Alchemy of Yellow Perception

The dominant yellow color—a tribute to Van Gogh's supposed hallucinations (linked to digitalis)—is no longer pathology but an optical utopia. By digitally saturating the tones, you convert the original melancholy of Banque de l'Oise (painted before his suicide) into a meditation on resilience. Yellow becomes a transcendent filter, recalling Merleau-Ponty's words: "To see is always to see more than one sees."

4. Subrealism: Between Ghost and Pixel

My mixed media invents a spectral realism where Van Gogh's landscape haunts the digital medium like a data ghost. The hand-cut layers preserve human imperfection, while the animation introduces algorithmic precision. This friction generates a "hallucinated realism," close to Fisher's concept of hauntology: art as the apparition of the past in the technological present.

Conclusion: Van Gogh in the Age of Flux

"Agitating Entropy" doesn't just reinterpret Van Gogh; it performs his method in the digital space, making abstraction an act of resurrection. The Xanthopsia collection, through this yellow prism, offers an artistic epistemology where each work is a knot in the web of time – an invitation to see, like Van Gogh, the light radiating through the cracks of reality.

Tribute to Van Gogh: « Bank of the Oise at Auvers »

See the original work at :  Detroit Institute of Arts