" Operations " Atlan's catalogue exhibition 2018

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/ TETRAGRAMISATIONS

This work tackles the antagonism between digital photography, a highly contemporary medium, and the old painting, bound to gesture and materiality. Everything begins with the “tetragrams”: these paintings are made of rectangular monochromes, arranged to form a square with an empty hole in the middle.

These 1500 tetragrams are then photographed and used as “pixels” to recompose a pre-existing photograph.

Each pixel of the original photograph is replaced by a tetragram pixel – like 4-points abstract landscapes.

The tetragrams act as a stowaway concealed at the core of the photographs. Painting both composes and decomposes them, making them look like outmoded pointillist paintings or some kind of of tapestry.

Yet in another way it also gives the photographs some density, another reading-level, far away from the easy enchantment of photography.

/ GEOMETRY OF RUINS

Consider it an exploration into the material depth of paint, or an exploration into representation itself.

Paintings are stuck together face to face. Then they are torn apart, piece by piece. The final image appears, dependent on the strength of the materials, glue, canvas and paint and the the way the artist interacts.

As if upon photographic paper, textural landscapes and the patina of colors under the sheen of glue emerge. This is what is left to painting: irrevocable materiality, which implies physical commitment, and humility in the face of randomness.

Veliko Tarnovo. pigment print on digital fine art Rag HanemĂźhle paper 1/5

Summer tetragram Acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 cm x 4 : 84 x 84cm

Siena tetragram Acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 cm x 4 : 84 x 84cm

The source, pigment print on digital fine art Rag HanemĂźhle paper 1/5

Former flora. pigment print on digital fine art Rag HanemĂźhle paper.

On the leaf. pig-

1/5

ment print on fine art Rag HanemĂźhlepaper.

1/5

The drape pigment print on digital fine art Rag HanemĂźhl paper.

1/5

Electric ponies, pigment print on digital fine art Rag HanemĂźhle paper.

1/5

National mourning, tetragram, Acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 cm x 4 : 84 x 84cm Private collection

Soulages Tetragram.

Acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 cm x 4 : 84 x 84cm

Departures, pigment print on digital fine art Rag HanemĂźhle paper 1/5

The beach people, pigment print on digital fine art Rag HanemĂźhle paper 1/5

Geometry of ruins. The fold, Acrylic on canvas 130 x 162 cm

Geometry of ruins.

ThumbnaiI I. Acrylic on canvas, 55 x 64 cm

Geometry of ruins.

ThumbnaiI II. Acrylic on canvas, 55 x 64 cm

American impressions, sunset. Acrylic on canvas 160 x 200 cm

Geometry of ruins. portulan. Acrylic on canvas 73x 84 cm

Guestbook I. Acrylic on canvas, quadriptyque, 48 x 66 cm Private collection

Guestbook II. Acrylic on canvas, quadriptyque, 48 x 66 cm Private collection

Geometry of ruins.

To Bonnard. Acrylic on canvas 27 x 22 cm.

Geometry of ruins.

ThumnaiIs. Acrylic on canvas, 55 x 64 cm

Geometry of ruins. Splinters. Acrylic on canvas,195 x 98 cm

Geometry of pixels.

Acrylic on canvas 33 x 24 cm

Geometry of ruins. In-quarto. Acrylic on canvas 114 x 146 cm

To René Ghil. Acrylic on canvas 92 x 73 cm

Geometry of nanomaterials . Acrylic on canvas 77 x 96 cm

Geometry of ruins. Forests. Acrylic on canvas 114 x 146 cm

Praise of joy. Acrylic on canvas 130 x 162 cm

Geometry of ruins. The servant. Acrylic on canvas 130 x 162 cm

THE ARTIST

PRESS

http://artshebdomedias.com/article/ chirurgies-plastiques-de-frederic-atlan https://www.tk-21. com/Operations-Surle-corps-des-images

https://www.franceculture.fr/personne/ frederic-atlan

http://imago.blog. lemonde.fr/2018/11/01/ frederic-atlan-la-longuemarche-du-pigment-aupixel

Frédéric Atlan does plastic surgery on art What if painting could somehow resist the imposition of a digital order by processes comparable to surgical grafts? Either by destabilizing a digital way of seeing or by becoming a geometrical trace of its’ ruin, grafts of pictures or algorithms interfere with the digital matrices.

Frédérique Atlan is a multi-disciplinary artist and musician of painting, video and performance.

He is artist in residence at 28 rue Beaurepaire in Paris for 8 days - until the 4th of November. His exhibition of 20 or so recent paintings are at a crossroads between photography and painting.

Conjugating eras and practices, the acrylic abstracts are like vestiges of the past, encountering strange photographic prints. These prints are infiltrated by the aesthetic melody of painted tetragrams. Like a type of pictorial magic scale, tetragrams are used as chromatic elements.

“The tetragramisations are undermined by the tension between its painting components and the digital medium - a grand universal equivalent which unify everything and put everything at level : hence they appear as ghostly pictures of a world lost in a visual kaleidoscope.”states Muriel Louâpre, researcher and lecturer at Paris-Descartes University.

"The tetragrams propose a new mathesis, a global order which incorporates two modes of representation. On one side, the materiality and gestural qualities of painting, and on the other, the pixels and algorithms of the digital."

Emblematic figure of the Parisian art squats of the 1990’s, the unending preamble to the 1997 Documenta X in Cassel, the artist is also known under the pseudonym Sonic Surgeon on the experimental music scene. By his contemporary thinking on painting and by his operations of analogue and mathematic substitutions, he demonstrates how painting is amply capable of resisting dissolution within the digital universe of space and time. Painting’s archaic qualities of gestes, traces and color are essential. Frédéric Atlan hadn’t exhibited in France for 6 years, so we invited him for his “Polychromies futures “and other enigmatic video objects (1) in our special edition on “Aesthetics of sound” of 2016 (Les esthétiques de l’écoute en 2016). At that time, his first series of tetragramisations had just left the workshop to be shown in Japan (by the gallery IND in Nara). A few days before the opening of his exhibition Operations, which took place on Wednesday the 31st of October, the artist accepted to participate in a word game.

Operation It’s the title of the exhibition, in plural, it’s a reference to surgical paint “grafts”: for example, in The Geometry of ruins (Géometrie des ruines), a series I’m presenting, I take two paintings, the donator and the recipient - I take a painting that’s more or less a failure - a reject - I glue it to the recipient - generally it’s a monochrome, I rip it. It’s a very physical act which paradoxically leaves a very delicate, exquisite result on the canvas. An exchange of material takes place between the canvases which gives the impression of going into the interior of the paint. In the digital world of today, what’s left of painting apart from its’ materiality, its’ gestures and the physical engagement we put into it? In one of my exhibitions, called Infra which was presented at Apacc in 2012 at Monteuil, I literally was searching for a way to go into the interior of the paint, I entered the material and sanded it down.

Tetragrams Tetragramisation is also an operation, but this time in the digital or mathematic sense. Rectangular, monochrome canvases are staggered around an empty center; this forms a square of about 84 cm by 84 cm. With that hole in the middle, its evocative of the idea of absolute emptiness, or of God. My procedure was to take 4 canvases painted with acrylics and place them in different positions, I elaborated close to one thousand five hundred tetragrams and photographed them. This took me two years.

At a moment, I even said to myself, I was only going to do that: a daily tetragram that would be the colour of the day, it seemed interesting to me to translate the emotion of the day into pure colour. Colour, it’s life. And then I went to see a contemporary tapestry exhibition, and that’s what gave me the idea of replacing the pixels of photographs, which I was already doing anyway, with my tetragrams. Often with images that were a bit blurry, strange or ambiguous, like that field with the ponies grazing with the high-tension wires hanging above. On the computer, using algorithmic operations, I exchanged the pixels from the picture of the pho-

tographic subject and used them to recompose the image using high definition snapshots and my painted tetragrams...so in that operation it was the gesture and materiality that tested its’ resistance to the digital : seen from a distance, the tetgramisations make you think of pointillism, a bit outdated, or even a tapestry, but as you approach, instead of noticing blurry pixels like in classic digital photos, we notice a very rigorous abstraction, having the famous 4 of tetragrams as the unit base. If I had the means to print these realizations on paintings or on monumental canvases, we could see them from the moon! We could create images 2km wide, composed of tetragrams of more than 1 meter high; in approaching the image, we would see the grain of the paint on the canvas, the abstract image of pure paint that intervenes to disrupt our perception. The weird thing with tetragramisations is that they enchant the real, it’s like they are casting a spell on the image. Like with that canvas in the Operations exhibition of a woman lying down, the one which makes you think of Sleeping Beauty with its confetti effect, bathing and wrapping her up in gentleness, when in fact it’s a homeless person in a laundromat, lying on a table with bandages, (Veliko Tarnovo). It’s also way of questioning the digital which always gives a perfect, over polished, practical image of reality, when what’s hidden behind isn’t always much worth celebrating.

Healing Take that Geometry of ruins series example again, where I used old canvases, the rejects I gave a second chance to, by giving them an operation. It’s also that idea of art healing us from life’s superficial artefacts by giving us the desire of searching and digging to unearth things that are more important in our relationship with the world. I thought to myself that art must be good for us, it makes us grow and develop, without art I would be very unhappy: I still am a bit (smiles), but it helps me to live. Sonic surgeon - it’s my name as a musician - it’s surgery again, operations - it comes from the desire to heal through art, that’s arts’ contribution to the world ! The squats where I passed a lot of time in the 1990’s weren’t artist ghettos, they already

were a tentative to repair the world, or at least research into an alternative to consumerism: there was a social welfare dimension, we welcomed those people who had lost their roots in life, who were lost. They were places of artistic experimentation, but also experimentations to do with social welfare.

Experimentation When you are at an abandoned industrial site, everything is possible, but you must act quickly to make occupation legitimate. Unlike the workshop where you can reflect, analyze, go to and fro, at the site you must be spontaneous, quick, this allows you to get things out of yourself fast and experiment, knowing you’ll come back to them later. Besides, I’m not at all conceptual, I understand by making things, by experimentation: what interests me in art is the research, it’s first to understand myself a bit better, and then to try to make visible what I came to understood about things, and then find out if I’m alone or if there are others who understand things the same way. In that way, I didn’t just want to keep only to painting, even if it’s what I’ve kept to for more than 30 years, I wanted to find other modes of expression: after a motorcycle accident, with a broken hand, I couldn’t paint so I started doing video. That year I tried 3D, and put up with having to learn the program (4D cinema) to do it, in the process making a film on the controversy over Koons tulips in front of the Palace of Tokyo. (Palais de Tokyo) The video is called «Let’s change eras!»

(Changeons d’ère) I made models of the bouquet and the palace, before blowing them up; night fell, and in the early morning a field covered with flowers appears whereas the palace comes up out of the earth as completely different architecture.

Music Music has always interested me: at 15 I played in a rock band, and in 1997, for the occasion of the Documenta X in Cassel, we went up to Germany with a few artist and squatter friends. We secretly prepared a rave and created artworks

in situ in an immense place; Art Press noted the intrusion of Techno music into the art scene. At the time, we made it a point of honor to make our names disappear from the cartels! Much later, around 2006-2007, I met Andy Bolus, Evil Moisture at the Mirror factory (la Miroiterie) He created noise music, from noise, and I liked it.

Just thinking of that makes me remember an improvised piece recorded with the means at hand at the Mirror factory; it’s a bit sad: it’s about the dreams and disillusions inherent to squat.

We influenced each other, he started painting, and I started doing music - it’s the wonderful potential for these kinds of cross-pollinations that often happens in squats.

Protocol I understood after that encounter, that we can approach music in many ways and I wanted to make music following a protocol. It’s an approach which is experimental and is also open to professional or non-professional musicians finding each other for creating sound pieces.

The principal is simple: I invite people together with the objective of making a performance the following week; everyone expresses themselves however they want to play, with whatever instrument or simply with noise, the sound that he or she wants to make, then we make an outline of the proceedings, and maybe a narrative.

Depending on the situation, we make a kind of music score, we don’t rehearse at all. The day of the concert, I submit the protocol which has been decided by everybody before and the public gets a copy as well. Obviously, what happens is not exactly what’s written on paper, but I’d like to keep doing this kind of experience, that it’s open to all kinds of music - from the aspect of instrumental recording, with personalities, sensitivities and all kinds of intelligences, all very different, whether they are mathematicians or philosophers, we join forces. Again, for me, it’s another way to research and construct, together, a new world.

Questioning It’s to provoke quite a strong reaction. For 10 years, every day I did my sheep, crossing Paris on a bicycle: suddenly I started bleating, very loud, between two pumps on the pedals or when I was stopped at the traffic light. This created spatial-temporal breaches, to put it simply, for anyone who happened to be in the vicinity, nothing else existed except that bleating. Paradoxically, the sound is loud, when itself, it’s the gentlest animal in the world. Even that wasn’t conceptual, I took note of people’s reactions and thought about it afterwards. That irruption of bleating revealed people’s state of mind, like the tourists who found themselves in situations like «sheep» wandering around close the Louvre or Notre Dame laughed and found it funny, but those who seemed to be hating their jobs were rather aggressive. All that finished the day I was crossing over the bridge Pont des Arts, when a guy punched me right in the face; I found myself in the hospital with a double nose fracture. The sheep performance made people think about what they were living; it’s become a sort of urban legend. Sometimes I’m just walking around in Paris and someone recognizes me comes up to me and goes «Baaaa!»

Arte Radio documentation of that performance beats all the audience records. (2) Trace A trace is that memorial aspect: what remains of us and of things? That brings me back to the squats: for example, with the abandoned industrial sites I started thinking about the buildings’ pasts. I followed where time had worn its’ lines, tracing over them with a black line, with a paintbrush or a spray can, like where the machines had been placed the paint seemed fresher, or where you could see traces of humidity, or where places had been worn by sunlight, or even erosion of the ground in the places where

the workers passed. It gave the buildings a chance to say a few last words before demolition, of their experience, and of their history. In the squats, I worked a lot on the ground and in my painting, I like to keep the imprint of these places. You find that in the Geometry of ruins series: what will be left when I tear off the paint?

Liberty For me limits and liberty are intertwined: when I discovered painting, I felt the sensation of incredible liberty, but also, very quickly, my limits. I did painting in the pursuit of liberty, when often in reality we lock ourselves up in a style, or a way of doing something. So, I asked myself how to get over all that? Finally, I think one needs to set quite a rigorous framwork and impose strict limits to better experience that liberty. I think there are different forms of liberty: one which is total, where anything goes, and one which is interior and that one must search for and unearth, and that’s the one that interests me. When your preliminaries are to define a working protocol, a rigorous framwork then one is free to explore even the most insignificant aspects of that field and let yourself run completely wild in it. For me that’s what liberty is. Liberty is at work in the Operations exhibition, where from a given process, and even from the same constraints, completely different results are discovered!

(1) L’inéluctable, the film is in competition at the Xe Festival of Fashion Film October, 2018.

(2) Documentary “A Sheep riding a bike. Is Paris bleating?”? (« Un mouton à vélo. Paris bêlet-il ? ») (Aline Chambras, Arte Radio, 2010).

Thursday 25th of October on France Culture, Frédéric Atlan presents the exhibition Opérations for Notebooks of creation ( Carnets de la création) at the microphone of Aude Lavigne.

"Les chirurgies plastiques de Frédéric Atlan", Véronique Godé, in ArtsHebdoMédias, november 2018, translated by Rebecca Probyn

Frédéric Atlan: the long road from pigment to pixel

As digital announced its blatant ambition towards painting, curiosity sometimes gave way to defiance. Confronted by the authentic painterly gesture, and the physicality of the canvas, how can we analyze this new practice where the idea of a singular identity is fictive, and the only reality is a virtual one?

Going back in time to processes of creation, man was alone for thousands of years, first facing the paroi of the cave, then the surface of the canvas. Now the digital has come to change the deal. The machine, the computer is still seen as an intruder bearing every suspicion. The ease with which the artist can play, erase, undo, do, is stupefying. Chiefly every accusation has been put forward to discredit the idea of there even being a fully-fledged digital art at all.

In his most recent exhibition 6 years ago at l'APPAC in Montreuil, Frédéric Atlan took it upon himself to explore painting. In that "Infra", he

made us inspect the canvas. The artist brought to light the complex surface where the support and paint meld together to give a result bearing no relation to any pre-established image code. At work in this painting was a confrontation between a support and its' painted layers, between white, black and colors and between micro forms and materials. During this visual experience, the painter asked the spectators to imagine that perhaps the voyage didn't end there, perhaps they could glimpse even further into that chasm, penetrating it deeper still.

Today, at l'Espace Beaurepaire the painter's work has blossomed in a new proposition, a fruition of many years of travel along a long road.

As in previous work, Frédéric Atlan is a kind of physicist, plunging into the heart of materiality. Seeking the heart of the image is how we perceive the compositions of basic fragments of color created from "tetragrams”: "Rectangular monochromes arranged to form a square

around an empty peep-hole." The exhibition bears witness to a toing and froing between material and image, and between pigment and pixel. The artist's investigation into Tetragrams evolved in close association with emotions and sensations. This investigation provided the elements to constitute a new photographic image. Generating a singular alchemy between television's classic trichome (red, green and blue) and the tetragram, the new image is between pigment and canvas and between pixels and the digital image.

"When a work protocol, a rigorous framwork, is defined in the preliminary stages, explains the painter, we can explore even the most in-

significant fragments in a field and let ourselves go completely wild. For me, that's liberty. It's a question of liberty in the Operations exhibition, where we can obtain completely different results from the same process and constraints!

It means that the artist in no way loses his prerogative in relation to the computer and expresses his liberty through all the different aspects of his practice. My own personal preference, among these operations - to use a clinical term, is for that subtle game on the canvas's surface. Collage and ripping lead to such a delicate, ethereal result placing painting in the field of innovation.

"FrĂŠdĂŠric Atlan : la longue marche, du pigment au pixel", Claude Guibert, in blog Lemonde Les chroniques du chapeau noir, november 2018

Operations - on a body of images Veering into the problematic terrain of digital production, Frédéric Atlan’s current presentation of work shows a marked change since his last solo exhibition at l’Espace Beaurepaire (Paris Xe) 6 years ago.

His work is also available for perusal on Corridor Eléphant

the persistence of the material world and the subtle poetry of traces (Geometry of ruins). It’s a performance of open heart surgery on the material world of painting.

I.

Tetragramisations are experiences where painting phagocytes digital images by engulfing the digital and absorbing it into the painting. This series works the antagonisms between mediums par excellence. Contemporary digital photography is posited against the age-worn practice of painting bound to gestures and materiality. Painting has its’ archaisms; the act of painting itself, that essential, brute, body- technique. Aside from the act, all else is chit-chat.

Operational tools: rectangular monochromes arranged to form a square with an empty eyecup in the middle (the 1500 tetragrams).

These are photographed and used as a ma-

If digital art was merely a mathematical operation, it would calculate super-images like super-heroes. If digital art was a surgical operation, a sensitive world would be inoculated against decomposition. With mathematical and surgical precision, Frédéric Atlan’s work reflects on what the digital does to art, and on what power it leaves to painting.

Canvases and digital images associate pixels and algorithms (Tetragramisations), of

Tetragramisations: hand to hand combat between painting and the digital order.

trix to digitally recompose a pre-existing photo. Tetragrams are like pixels, they are four point landscapes. The tetragramised photos offer a second level reading, the “close up”.

Recomposed? Or decomposed? All is in the eye of the beholder. Is the photo covering the pseudo-pixel painting, or is the painting covering the photo, duplicating it as though it were a weaving of materiality, reminiscent of the textile grain in high warp tapestry.

The photos are both extreme and contemporary. The tetragramisations create an ambiguous universe between an outmoded canvas and pixilation.

Imbuing the world with sensitivity, the monochromes form a discrete weave of tetragramisations, inversing or even purifying an obscene, cumbersome reality through abstraction.The open-air room of a homeless Bulgarian under an archway, ponies grazing on the scant grass growing below high tension wires, the clean-shaven sex of a porn star draped in antiquity, Parisians boarding the metro train, not going very far...

The geometry of ruins: a radical operation on the resistance of materials Just as phantasmagoric, the paintings in the “Geometry of ruins” series draw on the canvas and paint as materials themselves to construct a delicate and mysterious archeology of traces.

In this case, it’s the canvas which draws, not the paint. Canalizing the material resistance of canvas, Atlan glues two painted and polished canvases face to face and then separates them.

The artist gradually tears them down, piece by piece, considering their natural resistance and emerging forms. Colors take on the sheen of glue and a textural landscape appears.

This is a singular technique which resumes the exploration of manual leafing techniques as used in poster tearing. Combining this technique with painting gives an effect which is close to the process of stamping (impressing). Glue and canvas take the place of color and stand in as paint.

From this physical, even brutal operation, a visual universe of a vanished, delicate world emerges: elegant vignettes are like eloquent illustrations forever condemned to illegibility; canvas landscapes surge with richly colored

scales like mysterious cartographies.

Sometimes, stamping is a radical duplication, the canvas partly comes away, doubling back on herself in an act of recreation. Or rather, she falls away like a magnificent chrysalis, classically draping the former oeuvre.

The artist Profoundly attached to the materiality of the gesture, Frédéric Atlan’s work over the last ten years has focused on producing tensions at the surface of representation. Traces of these processes are conserved as materials of representation. Atlan develops a singular dialogue between the arts of time and the notion of archives, carrying it into the domains of experimental music and digital video.

II. A mechanism to inspire images.

A note on the tetragram in the recent work of Frédéric Atlan A grey dot and paint When the four monochromes are arranged to form a square the center is inevitably left empty. These four elements function like a matrix allowing infinite combinations, and this is the basic formula for the pictorial work.

Each square, in the measure that it is linked to the other three, forms a whole. They are like the letters of a visual and pictorial language which can potentially be expanded to infinity.

A tetragram isn’t only color, it’s also a form. This form is always identical and its’ center is always empty. It’s an empty grey dot which seems to inspire the pictorial text. One could consider it as a principal which inspires form, a kind of technical reserve. The grey dot is a blind spot, an empty center of unnamable origin which nevertheless is active. One who calls it an eye, calls it a pupil, a hole in the night wherewith the visible is swallowed up, first to be lost and then to be recomposed within the cerebral labyrinth.

One thinks here of what Paul Klee wrote in his “Note on the grey dot” (in Théorie de l’art moderne): “Real chaos could never be weighed on scales, it would forever be unthinkable and incommensurable. It would correspond more to the imagined center of a pair of scales.

The dot is the symbol of this non-concept. It’s not a real dot, but a mathematical dot.

That nothingness-being or being-nothingness is a non-conceptual concept of non-contradiction. To make this non-being visible (by deciding to treat it as a subject and establishing it as a kind of internal statement), one draws upon the concept of grey, that fateful grey dot which is between that which comes to life and that which dies.”

Imagination without an image.

In slipping this pictorial device into the field of photography, Frédéric Atlan uses tetragrams as a matrix to digitally recompose a pre-existing snapshot. This process transforms the image by a pictorial device which at once produces a “revelation” by deploying the infinite within a limited setting. The force of the matrix is thus revealed but also obscured. One is redirected to the visible “objective” of the photographic image, and to the unavoidable indeterminacy of its’ origin.

The images he proposes are situated at an interface between a pictorial image and a visible image. The visible image is the hypothetical version which doubles elements borrowed from reality.

In fact, what these images reveal is the omnipresence of the fifth element, because the tetragram functions by liberating the elemental matrix to existence from within the center of the empty, grey, square dot. This is more an illustration of a condition of possibility and not so much an image of the visible.

The revelation which is offered is an indeterminate or floating image. “Visibility” floats before our eyes, shaking a fundamental mechanism of compensation and invention - the imagination.

What we see then are images which implicate the activity of the imagination in a technical

sense, but also at the same time in a most effective and most accurate way!

The fifth element It is the grey dot which sets things in motion, without it there is no movement. The grey dot multiplies by bouncing. In a way, it’s as if the movement of bouncing against itself creates the image.

The image is of what it “is” and of how it is known to “be”. The image captures this process-movement, composing data of what is happening in the heart of movement. This movement is thought of like a voyage but not as the fruit of liberty or a decision. The voyage results from a passage from state to state of a material whose most fundamental and inherent property is perpetual movement.

It’s not so much that the image appears and disappears at a specific instant, but that the apparition is both intangible and constant.

The grey eye or grey dot in the center of the square of colors is the immaterial interface at the heart of matter, a non-conceptual concept in the field of thought, and the non-image at the source of the image.

At the heart of these four elements, there is a fifth one, fixed by the limits of the four and without which the grey dot would not exist.

Having a retroactive effect, the idea of an origin is shaken. That which has come to be, is also inscribed as the final place. Having a prospective effect, the apparition precipitates towards dissolution and disappears.

Here the imagination’s explicit double function is to elaborate a before and after. The present moment of hypothetical being is incarnated by an image as we see it or at least pretend to see it. And so, finally, this is how Frédéric Atlan’s work initiates us - through mechanics of creation and imagination.

III. To know more...

On the work of the video-artist: presentations in TK21 "Inclination and Truth", by JeanLouis Poitevin, on "Can you see anything

coming” “Ne vois-tu rien venir ?” : https://www. ingk-21.com/Clinamen-et-verite "What if nothing goes according to plan?", by Jean-Louis Poitevin, on « Polychromies futures » : https://www.tk-21.com/Et-si-rien-ne-se-passait-comme "Often, because the initiator isn’t hidden, people realize they’re being used as objects, to the point that they stare at the objective, walk towards the photographer to question him, or even maybe hit him." https://www.tk-21.com/Les-Debusquages

bert, on the Infra exhibition, Black Hat Chronicles, (Chroniques du chapeau noir, 9 juin 2012) : http://imago.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/06/09/ frederic-atlan-entrevoir-la-peinture/ Photos “Stabula", landscape burn-out - a tentative, presented by l’artothèque of the Aquitaine Mutuum region : http://www.mutuum.fr/stabula Videos https://vimeo.com/fredericatlan

"Men in black family life" : https://www.tk-21.com/Men-inblack-family-life "Passengers of time" https://www.tk-21.com/Les-passagers-dutemps "A 200 000-year story" https://www.tk-21.com/Une-histoire-de-200000-ans On the pictural oeuvre in general Portrait-documentary of Lily Tournay "Frédéric Atlan, paintings or mirrors"( "Frédéric Atlan, peintures ou miroirs") (8mn, Digital éditions, 2009) : http://www.filmdocumentaire. fr/4DACTION/w_fiche_film/31262_1 Where? The exploratory mission into the depth of that material called paint. It has more worlds than can be counted» Presentation of the Infra exhibition (APACC, Montreuil, 2012): https://www.artactu.com/infra-par-frederic-atlan.html

Other scenes and urban disruptions Aka Sonic Surgeon - Album "46", Kaosthetik Konspiration, 2010 : h t t p s : / / w w w. d i s c o g s . c o m / f r / S o n i c - S u rgeon-46/release/2260465 h t t p s : / / s o u n d c l o u d . c o m / s o n i c s u rg e o n Protocolary music https://www.facebook.com/ groups/389721374804612/ Aka the sheep-bike of Ménilmontant, long term anonymous performance Documentary “A sheep on a bike. Is Paris bleating?" ("Un mouton à vélo. Paris bêlet-il ? Aline Chambras, Arte Radio, 2010" ): https://www.arteradio.com/son/615809/un_m outon_velo

"Does the experience of a visual trip between layers, forms and colors have to end there? The painter has the microscope at the ready to delve even deeper into that chasm" Claude Guil-

"Opérations sur le corps des images", Muriel Louâpre and Jean-Louis Potevin in TK-21, november 2018, translated by Rebecca Probyn

Interview by Aude Lavigne, les Carnets de la crĂŠation France Culture, french cultural radio channel, November 2018

Paris, Belleville,pigment print on digital fine art Rag HanemĂźhle paper 1/5

More information: fredericatlan@gmail.com