Eric Vernhes

Eric Vernhes creates kinetic, visual and sound devices and installations whose behaviour he programs according to self-generative, interactive or hybrid logic. Initially an architect, and later a scriptwriter, filmmaker and musician, Vernhes has developed a career as a multidisciplinary artist with a resolutely humanist approach. The digital processes he uses are extracted from their technical context to serve a timeless discourse inspired by literature and philosophy. The demanding aesthetics, as well as the use of noble materials, move us away from the manufacturing processes of engineering to bring us closer to the humanity of the gesture. Vernhes thus lends existence to anthropoid creations: the proper movement of the works, by marrying that of our conscience, also seems to embrace our own humanity and allows us to witness the spectacle of it.

Eric Vernhes' work is shown in international exhibitions, art centres and foundations. He also creates scenographic and visual creations in live performance and teaches technological arts.

His work is part of several private collections and foundations, including the Hermès Foundation (FR), the Frankel Foundation (USA), BEEP collection (ES), Artphilein Foundation (CH).

Blueprints and L’Idée (The Idea) are two artworks by Eric Vernhes exploring the birth of an idea in the mind of the creator, its translation into writing or drawing, and later in its constructed form.

Blueprints was created using two generative software programs. The first, designed by the artist himself, transposes music into an abstract score or blueprint (right half of the screen). This dancing, linear pattern is then interpreted by a second software program using artificial intelligence, over which the artist has only partial control. The result is a moving image featuring stylized representations of architecture, construction sites, sports equipment, athletes and crowds (left half of screen).

This work speaks to the abundance of projects born out of the Olympic Games. Generative AI is deliberately used here to signify this extraordinary number of ideas and images.

L’Idée is a series of seven digital prints inspired by a text by Robert Musil from The Man Without Qualities (1932). The Austrian writer was 16 in 1896 at the moment of the first, modern Olympic Games. His work is marked by multiple references to the body and an interest in sports.

The text quoted in the digital prints of Blueprints attempts to describe the blossoming of an idea, its relationship to the flesh as well as to the mind, even to something greater, and how the words to describe it can escape us. Musil also evokes the suddenness and the marvelous, brilliant, almost magical, nature of an idea, and then the moment when it is finally tamed and organized in the mind, ready to be used. Then, it seems, the idea is compromised by contact with reality, making it impossible to return to its original state.

Eric Vernhes interprets this text using three kinds of images. A text-image, based on Musil's text, illegible for the first few pages, as the characters are grouped into compact shapes. This represents the first moments in the life of an idea. Gradually, these shapes break down to become legible and comprehensible.

Next to it, a seemingly simple drawing, made up of a few geometric elements - squares, lines, dots, rectangles - develops, seeking the ideal composition as the text-image becomes clearer. Finally, a computer-generated silhouette starts out abstract, before becoming increasingly human-like, realistic, "compact", to quote Musil.

By the seventh and final page, at the very moment when the idea has been expressed, when it has reached its greatest clarity, when the text is perfectly legible and the diagram has found its point of balance, even becoming integrated into the space of the silhouette, the man removes himself: the idea, now alive and in the flesh, continues on its journey, henceforth autonomous.