Born in Grenoble in 1974, Jacques Perconte lives and works between Rotterdam and Paris.
For just over twenty-five years, he has been developing an audiovisual and cinematographic body of work in which environment and landscape are the vehicles of an aesthetic that disrupts vision as much as the technologies it implements.
His work moves between cinemas, exhibition spaces and the stage. His works, though they take a variety of forms (linear film, generative film, audiovisual performance, print, installation) are the result of ongoing experimental research.
From Normandy to the peaks of the Alps, from the depths of Scotland to the polders of the Netherlands, he passionately roams and films the elements. The surprising universalism of the form, which seems to hark back visually to what painting was like when it seized on nature as a motif, is born of the relationship between the delicate rhythm and apparent gentleness of the subjects and the extreme technicality of the images, which manifest their digital reality in all their dimensions. The energy of Jacques Perconte’s gesture is inscribed in the image produced by the camera, and is revealed by freeing itself from its constraints through the technological nature of the images.
Exploration with internet and video computing in the late 90s led him to lay the foundations of a new aesthetic as the first artist to work with moving images by hijacking digital compression methods. World-renowned for his singular mastery of images, Jacques Perconte takes us into the very nature of video and its making to find new proximities with its sensations.
Thanks to reverse-engineering and the expert manipulation of coding and storage technologies, this hijacking of the high-tech processes of the audiovisual industry goes beyond the technical question and succeeds in turning its landscapes into colorful fairy-tales whose critical and popular success goes from strength to strength.
This work is part of a critical history of representations, from painting to cinema. The landscape tradition is envisaged in a new primitivity enabled by technology: Jacques Perconte reveals to us “the landscape of the image rather than the image of the landscape”.
Internationally distributed in documentary and avant-garde cinemas and festivals, celebrated by critics, his films have been the subject of several retrospectives and major monographic programs. In 2014-2015,the Cinémathèque française dedicates to him the avant-garde cycle entitled soleils. In 2012, Léos Carax invites her to take part in his film Holy Motors. In 2019, Jean-Luc Godard uses an excerpt from his film Après le feu in Livre d’images.
While he did some audiovisual performances in the early 2000s, it was only ten years later that he returned to the French and international stages with prestigious musical collaborations (Jean-Benoît Dunckel, Jeff Mills, Mikhail Rudy, the Onceim, among others).
Over the past fifteen years or so, its link with research has grown stronger, first with the thesis of Bidhan Jacobs, then with the work of Nicole Brenez, Vincent Sorrel, Antonio Somaini, Vincent Deville, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Megan Phipps, Fred Brayard, Muriel Tinnel-Temple, Sean Cubitt, Yves Citton, Alice Leroy… who truly become actors in the development of his approach.
Collaborations are an important part of Jacques Perconte’s practice. They include filmmakers, composers, musicians and poets. To those already mentioned, let us note Julien Desprez, Samuel André, Julien Ribeil, Hélène Breschand, Eric-Maria Couturier, Julie Rousse, Michel Herreria, Didier Arnaudet, Marc Em, Hugo Verlinde, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Eddie Ladoire, Mélaine Dalibert, Simonluca Laitempergher, Vidal Bini.
His videos, infinite films, generative explorations of his research and impressions are presented in solo and group exhibitions. In 2016, he was selected along with a dozen living artists to rub shoulders with Gustave Courbet’s landscape paintings in the exhibition Courbet et la nature at l’Abbaye d’Auberive. In 2022, for six months he presents a new monumental video work for the French presidency of the European Union at the Conseil de l’Europe in Brussels. In 2023, the Lieu Unique in Nantes offers him a thousand square meters for a major monographic exhibition. In 2024, it’s at the Générateur in Gentilly and at l’Abbaye de Noirlac that he once again offers monumental works and the question of the spatialization of his images is engaged.
Jacques Perconte is represented by Galerie Charlot.
The research text What drives me is available in full at : https://www.technart.net/effortmonde/
Website : https://www.jacquesperconte.com/
Instagram : @jacquesperconte
more info on the exhibition L’Effort, the world from May 4 to July 13, 2024.