Hervé Graumann
Prix Gustave Buchet 2006

Organized by the Fondation Gustave Buchet in collaboration with the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts of Lausanne, this exhibition aimed to give greater visibility to the recipient of the prize. After Anne Blanchet in 2000 and Christian Floquet in 2003, Hervé Graumann presented a selection of recent works representative of his artistic practice.

Since the late 1980s, Hervé Graumann (*1963, Geneva, where he lives and works) has developed his work in parallel with digital technology. The artist diverts, questions, critiques, and plays with the tools, formal vocabulary, and logic inherent to this new medium. In 1993, he created the character Raoul Pictor, a virtual painter—a computer program designed to generate images endlessly (Raoul Pictor cherche son style…). While the artist creates animated films and internet-based projects, he also conceives physical equivalents of this virtual universe. He applies the principle of sampling by gridding, numbering, and then cutting everyday objects into small squares, carefully reassembling them to recreate not the original object, but its image. Using the common copy/paste technique, he manually reproduces a single module, composed of assembled industrial objects, to construct vast spatial compositions titled Patterns—a kind of “electronic still life” where the original disappears in the repetition of the motif.

For his exhibition at Espace Arlaud, Hervé Graumann presented an entirely new Pattern. The assembled objects, often trivial and mundane, are selected for their formal qualities, the brilliance and vibrancy of their colors, as well as their serial nature. They become the fundamental elements of a repetitive pattern that extends into space along a corridor that cannot be crossed. The visitor observes this scene through a glass pane, as if looking at a screen.

In a second room, two videos invite the viewer to virtually enter a photographic landscape. However, the further one advances, the less the photographic data suffices. The visitor then finds themselves in a space where abstract color planes fill the gaps, giving the landscape a simultaneously fantastical and improbable quality. A series of photographic prints derived from this digital universe complemented the exhibition, questioning the very nature of the image.