EXHIBITION

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IAMAI
EMO DE MEDEIROS
02 JUNE - 10 OCTOBER 2024
VERNISSAGE : SUNDAY 02 JUNE 2024  16:00

Galerie Dominique Fiat is delighted to present the new solo exhibition of Emo de Medeiros from June 2 to October 10, 2024, during Traversées Africaines.

Image: Id#111 (Wole's Tiger II), 2024

Mixed technique on paper: black stone, colored pencil, watercolor, ink, oil pastel, felt pen, ballpoint pen, burnt paper. Dim: 30 x 42 cm

"A tiger doesn't proclaim its tigritude, it pounces"

Wole Soyinka, 1962

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Here is the process of creating the works in my series of "augmented drawings" ID#: (palindrome hand-AI-hand)

  • I uploaded 333 of my drawings to ChatGPT.

  • I asked ChatGPT to use these drawings, along with its knowledge of my work (because I am fortunate that it knows my work, otherwise this project would have been impossible), to generate images "that could be created by Emo de Medeiros."-

  • I extracted the "prompts" (instructions given to the AIs) to inject them into three other generative image AIs (including Leonardo.ai).

  • I used these three AIs, gradually modifying the "prompts" in an experimental process to generate several thousand drawings "in the style of Emo de Medeiros."

  • I selected the "virtual" drawings that were exactly what I wanted, i.e., that were entirely mine (after all, I am I), after an average of 100 to 200 generations of virtual drawings per selected drawing.

  • I burned all my original drawings and made a pigment from their ashes.

  • I printed the virtual drawings on drawing paper.

  • I drew and painted over the "skeleton" of the virtual drawings using both classic and symbolic mediums:

    1. Black stone (alchemy)

    2. Colored pencils (childhood), Sennelier oil pastels (Picasso)

    3. Watercolor (traditional European art)

    4. Markers (20th-century industrial)

    5. Bic pens (planetary object)

    6. The pigment produced from my burned drawings (distillate of the gesture)

Emo de Medeiros (1979), a Franco-Beninese artist, lives and works in Cotonou and Paris. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris/Ulm), the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (Paris), and the Massachusetts College of Art (MassArt).

His work has been exhibited internationally, in France (Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo), Germany (MARKK Hamburg), Brazil (Videobrasil Contemporary Art Festival Sao Paulo), Nigeria (LagosPhoto), the UK, Japan, China, and in the biennials of Marrakech, Dakar, and Casablanca.

His works revolve around a unique concept he calls "contexture," a fusion of digital and material, tangible and intangible, exploring hybridizations, interconnections, and circulations of forms, technologies, traditions, myths, and commodities. He also draws upon new perspectives and conversations unfolding in a new space: the current context of the postcolonial, globalized, and digitized world of the early 21st century.

The use of artificial intelligence in this series of drawings by Emo de Medeiros embodies the singularity of this new tool. For what AI enables in these works is a paradoxical return to the deep roots of the artist's practice: those of the hand, of spontaneity, and of the primacy of raw emotion.Without renouncing the use of technology or the complexity and hybridity characteristic of his work, Emo de Medeiros reveals part of his intimate universe: fluid, multiple and mutating identities and psyches, on the borders of the immemorial and the future.