If, tapisserie installation (If, tapestry installation)

If, from Pascal Haudressy – tapestry installation on the theme “Tapestry-Matrix”, 2014 call for creation
Dimension of the tapestry: 3,20 m x 4,70 m. Resin sculpture, video screening

Linked with the State (Direction Générale de la Création Artistique / Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles / Massif Central), the call for creation took this year the form of a public artistic order for the making of a “tapestry-matrix”. This work aims to be mobile and itinerant, both a work of art and a mediation device. The jury designated Pascal Haudressy for his mixed media proposition: If.

A multidimensional project associating tapestry, resin sculpture, video screening and mediation device

Tapestry, sculpture, digital screening and cultural mediation device about the creative process of woven art, this piece sets at the same time history, tradition and tapestry know-how, while revisiting the medium’s scope of possibilities.

This piece, cultural matrix, legacy foundation, is both in relation with the past, History and our era. It leans on a temporal know-how and proposes a contemporary reinterpretation dialoguing with the issues and the representation systems of our time.

Formally, the tapestry is composed of three physical outlines, which act as molds in a structural and supportive way. One sculptural part, a foreground, then a second outline in the depth of field and finally the frame work. These three outlines complete each other and each frame surrounds the other and allows it to build itself.

The project extends the tapestry history through the iconic genre of the “greenery”. A vibrant, moving greenery where a fixed physical space, such as a legacy base, merges with potentiality, immateriality and a renewed movement without interruption, reconfigured, matrixed, in a contemporary synthesis.

Pascal Haudressy took inspiration from Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The tree with crows, in which the time seems suspended. He introduces a contemplative, meditative dimension, in our contemporary era marked by the virtual. He puts forward the pattern of the crow, link between the physical and spiritual world, between the woven media and the projected light.

The branches, in the foreground, give an impression of tree bark. In the middle ground, thinner, they seem to disappear, as if they were gradually absorbed by light. The sky occupies the background, like a framework, in which the tapestry and the ballet of the clouds blend. Thus, there is an impression of the tapestry absorbing the image at the same time that the image smooths the weaving’s weft.

Pascal Haudressy particularly comes across the question over the relationship between video and new mediums. The tapestry opens here new perspectives: the project summons both the traditional know-how and the research for new materials; it is both in relation with our era and takes root in the renewal of a temporal know-how. It intertwines a concrete textile material and material of light/movement, tradition and innovation. It is about creating new emulsions and interlacing, so much on the technical aspect as on the perceptual one. The video medium plays with the weft and the knot of the tapestry. The former, far from being a mere screen, functions by emulating the screened image, becomes “matrix” of the video and informatics mold, constituted of real captures footages and generated images.

The process in searching in light proprieties, optics in materials and their textures for the technical realization of the weaving – and through the latter the displayed know-how – is documented. The specificities of the different stages of the creation and production will be put forward in an objective of mediation.

The tapestry weaving was realized by Patrick and Marie Guillot’s workshop and Cc Brindelaine in 2015.

Pascal Haudressy, born in 1968, lives and works in Paris. Engraver and digital artist, his works count among the collection of international personalities and businessman. He is represented by the Louise Alexander Gallery. After ten years spent at UNESCO as head of the cultural projects and many realizations implying artists of international renown, Pascal Haudressy decides to devote himself fully to his personal artistic work. His first works date back to 2005. His work creates a link between past and future, between science and myth. From the very beginning, his sculptures, installations and videos characterize by their exceptional technicity and the use of high-tech materials and technologies. The esthetically pleasing aspect of a work fully well-worn by the artist never loses a strong symbolic dimension and an existential questioning on the becoming of Mankind. The mutations of the reality and the plurality of experiences which stems from it, constitute the nodal point of the consideration and Pascal Haudressy’s artistic experience. Discover the work of Pascal Haudressy on his website.

This project benefited from financial support from the Minister for Culture and Communication, the Programme Opérationnel Massif Central and the Languedoc-Roussillion Region.