Zancan

Jonathan Chomko

Jamie Reid

GAIKA

Tyler Hobbs

Anika Meier

David Shrigley

Hammad Nasar

This Is Tomorrow: Part II

Artist for the living: Museum Week presents Zancan, Entangled Others, Geoffrey Pugen, Phaust, and Paweł Grzelak

Verse Live at Frieze No.9 Cork Street

Capturing nature, a Ballet Mécanique in the wild: Zancan in conversation with Tyler Hobbs

Rapture Captured

I can't explain why the sight of a clump of grass growing bravely through the crack of a concrete wall gives me such joy. Or why watching my lawn explode in the spring into a chaotic throng of wild plant species demonstrating their determination to live fascinates me so much. There is something of the order of the unconscious, or of the collective consciousness, which attaches man to nature to the point of affecting his senses in a primal way, whereas I am like many an urban product of modernity and technology.

In my works, nature is not the main subject, but it is a means of depicting, among other things, the vital force, the resilience of the living. There is in its multiplicity and its autonomous, chaotic and organized aspect something that traditional painting did not allow me to capture, other than thanks to infinite labor and a gesture that was far too controlled. Algorithmic art opened up this possibility for me to render nature, in its movement, its density, its wild abundance.

The mesh is a familiar and basic object for the programmer, the framework of any 3D model, it represents the digital.

I used the yellow color for two reasons. First, the color chosen is a pure yellow (#ffff00) in the RGB spectrum, which immediately places it in the digital realm.  On the other hand the colors used for the representation of nature are muted, in order to attach it to the physical world. The background color also corresponds to that of a paper that I often use for my physical drawings.

Then, the yellow functions here as a representation of the sacred, like the illuminations on ancient religious texts. I am very admiring of certain contemporary painters or illustrators who use gold leaf over their drawings, allowing them to bring a surnatural light into their works, to access a higher stratum of symbolic representation looking towards spirituality. I never took the chance to try out this technique, and working digitally gave me that chance. 

The holes in the net that can be observed symbolize the impossibility of capturing the true nature, the real feeling that one experiences in its presence. The flowers, twisted to the extreme under netting, are there to evoke the sense of hypocrisy in using technology to create art that evokes nature, as a reminder of the impossible environmental challenges that we are facing while galloping toward the chimeras of technological progress.” - zancan. [Full interview here](https://verse.works/journal/capturing-nature-a-ballet-mecanique-in-the-wild)

This artwork was nominated on Verse by [Tyler Hobbs](https://verse.works/persons/tyler-hobbs), and 30% of the initial sale will be donated to the charity [Girls Who Code](https://girlswhocode.com/).