Pascal Dufaux considers the photographic image as an imprint, a two-dimensional flattened-out transfer of a three-dimensional reading of spatial reality.
In Around You and Alzheimer, Dufaux used the image as a systematic sampling operated on one or many individuals. His intension was to reveal the visual substance of the human body – face and trunk -, much like a cartographic transcription. In order to capture and transcribe this extra-realist image of the human surface, Dufaux built a motorized image recording device to capture the photographic image of a person on a 360-degree circumference in 36 digital clips, which were subsequently assembled in one panoptic view.
This photo-cartographic research is a prolongation of Dufaux’s experience as a sculptor and plastic practitioner. The mechanics of the 360-degree panoptic image with simultaneous multiple viewpoints was an attempt to represent a reality of the body that crosses the threshold of the natural perception to enter the realm of the fantastic. The result is a visual memory of the human body that has been enhanced, shifted and multilayered.
The raw, almost clinical gaze posed by the photographic process of the panoptic image captured an image of the self that eluded the traditional frontal standpoint of the camera and eliminated the classic criteria of what is considered photogenic. The impression and the vision of the subject becomes omnidirectional, open and expanded. Such a mode of representation presented the human body as a vast landscape made of intimate matter onto which the signs of personal history and identity have left a mark. These epidermic lanscape, made of age, racial and gender diversity became a field for the contemplation and the reading of a surface that never ceases to fascinate us, individually as much as collectively.
Pascal Dufaux was born in Marseille, France, and lives and works inTiohtiá:ke/Montreal, Canada. His work is a hybrid of sculpture, photography and media immersive environments. As part of his solo practice he makes abstract organic forms that encase cameras, which capture images of their surrounding. Through these sculptures / apparatus, which he calls Vision machine, he attempts to access a representation of reality that goes beyond his own perceptual limitations.
Dufaux has carried out artistic residencies at the Christoph Merian Foundation in Switzerland and at the Finnish Artists’ Association in Finland. His work has been presented in Canada at venues such as Oboro (Montreal), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), Galerie Joyce Yahouda and Galerie Bellemare-Lambert (Montreal), Sporobole Art Center (Sherbrooke), VU (Quebec city), Truck Gallery (Calgary), Neutral Ground (Regina), Eastern Edge (St.John's), Glass and Clay Museum (Waterloo), Alternator Gallery (Kamloops) and abroad at the Espacios de arte, Guanajuato (Mexico), at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck (Austria), Instants Vidéo festival in Marseille (France), in the Group shown Paranoïa organised by la MAC, Créteil, Maubeuge and Lille (France), Mapping Festival in Geneva (Switzerland), Lab30 in Augsburg (Germany), and Solway Gallery in Cincinnati, USA.
Since 2016 most of his art practice has been dedicated to his collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Sarah Wendt. For more information about Dufaux’s work, visit their shared website here.