My work usually revolves around the idea that there is more to reality than what we can perceive in our normal day-to-day lives. There's a whole range of potentially marvellous experiences that exist beyond our senses. From the perspective of science, most wavelengths that are outside of what our eyes can see, beyond ultraviolet and lower than infrared, or another example is there's cell phone radiation going through your body right now; you can't feel it but it's there. So this idea that there's more to the universe than just the physical, sensible reality, usually carries through my work.
There's also often a sense of time embedded in some of my work. I've been inspired by perpetual loops — pieces where you could start playing the video at any moment and finish it at any moment. They exist in perpetuity before the viewer begins looking, and continue forever after. That perspective has invaded my motion graphics work. This perpetual loop or continuous image creates a feeling of the infinite and the beyond that we don't encounter in our daily lives. With the theme of passage of time, there's this sense of ancient things and antiquity brought to the modern era. My mom was an archaeologist Egyptologist, so I grew up surrounded by books on ancient Egypt and Antiquity. I believe that's quite influential in my early works.
I also try to explore stories that have not been told. Since the mid to late 2000s, there's been a worthwhile discussion of decolonization in our society. And I think about an often overlooked group of people who've been completely, irreversibly colonized : western European pagan populations, colonized by Christian religions. You look at the stories in northwest France of Merlin's forest, of witches in the forest — these were the last holdouts of a religion and culture that existed before Christianity came and destroyed it. We have no written records of those stories. Looking at that, what were we before all of our pre-Christian history was completely destroyed? I think that's interesting to explore. There are hints of those records in ancient Greek religion, so it became a recurring theme in my works.
I focus on the notion of "architectural impossibility" and make it the format of my work. There's a lot of architectural or sculptural pieces that inspire me, and there's even some that I'm not even technically capable of approaching yet. There's a masterpiece in the Toledo Cathedral that has pillars melting into cherubs and angels and then melting back into pillars again… I'm totally infatuated with how skillfully it was made. Somebody spent years of their life creating it. I usually look to a real-world design and that's where the inspiration starts.
So, I have a vision of a scene, a landscape or a shape. And then, I cross-pollinate it with a story I'm trying to tell, using a figure. I typically work with human figures because I realized figureless pieces feel like something is missing. For Neptune, I wanted something oceanic. I wanted elements to move like it was a kelp forest or ocean waves. So I focus on how to create that effect realistically, asking myself, if that hair was actually moving, how would it have moved? What if it was moving in a perfect loop?
I also draw inspiration from painting. When creating a composition, I'm of the opinion that you should be able to see the whole work, all at the same time. Sure, it'd be nice to zoom in and see the details, but I prefer to think about it from the perspective of singular composition. Most people walking through museums only give each work of art two seconds. So, if they catch the wrong two seconds, they don't get to see the work. That thought process influences a lot of aspects of my works, like the lack of, or singular, camera movement, and the perpetual loop effect.
Next, I typically set a color palette, and generally limit myself to two thirds of the palette, though I've loosened that restriction recently. My choice of palettes has its roots in event design: when you have the lighting being peaches, pinks, yellows, everybody looks healthier. But if you set the lighting to blues and greens, everybody looks a bit more sickly. So, there's a psychological root in my expression of color, and some things are unbreakable habits.
When creating my works, I use Cinema 4D. In reality, I should just switch over to Blender or Unreal Engine because they're free. But the learning curve for new softwares means that it would take forever to get back to my current level with Cinema4D. When you pick up a software, you have to figure out sort of a whole maze of things to understand the tools. Back in the day, I could use some VJ softwares almost with my eyes closed — I could enter a flow state while using it. Now, I can do it with Cinema 4D. Other softwares are more of a struggle.
To a certain extent, yes. I definitely like using a pink-blue gradient… but I think it comes more from lived experience than from consciously adopting that label. I belong to a very specific generation that grew up without the internet and then experienced its emergence during adolescence. So I was there at the very beginning of online culture — early video games, early internet art, Flash experiments — these experimental things definitely influenced my art. Looking at Vaporwave from a contemporary point of view, for instance its color palette or dithering pixels, I borrowed some of that aesthetic.
I look back at all of the silly fun we had back then, even before MySpace. There was GeoCities, where everybody's website had an "under construction" banner at the bottom of it. There was a time when animated GIFs were the hottest thing: that idea of the loop, of something that just continues without interruption, has stayed with me and feeds directly into my work today. All of these effects come from an era that I look at with sincere nostalgia.
There's always a hope that it creates a sense of mystery, a sense of awe and a sense of wonder. An interest in learning more and the potential that there's more to the world, the universe, and our reality than we've been able to sense. I hope my art makes people self-reflect on this. We have our typical day-to-day reality… and then what is the reality that goes a little bit beyond that? Art adds this intangible value to people's lives.