Thomas Blanchard and the STELLAR IRIS series

Thomas Blanchard was born in 1984, in Lyon, and built a body of work that begins with a simple gesture: placing matter in front of the camera and waiting. Paint, oil, and pigment come together in a container, reacting with each other according to their own densities, and the artist records the encounter in close-up and slow motion. Nothing that appears on screen was generated later, on a computer. The final image is the chemical reaction itself, filmed at the moment it occurs, and the composition work lies entirely in the choice of materials and the moment of pressing the button.

STELLAR IRIS, one of the recent series, takes this procedure to a cosmic analogy. The close-up filmed reactions open up into forms that evoke stellar explosions, and what fits inside a drop comes to have the scale of a galaxy in formation. Part of the soundtrack and sound design of the series is signed by Stephano Sanchinelli and Dominic Walter Battista.

The work operates in two fields simultaneously, and this is one of the particularities of the career. Blanchard shot images for the launch of the iPhone X, from Apple, and the Galaxy Fold, from Samsung, and produced work for Sony, Dolby, LG, and Huawei. In the institutional field, he has been featured at the Casablanca Contemporary Art Biennale in 2016, at Artechouse in Washington, the Contemporary Art Museum in Seoul, and the Atelier des Lumières in Paris.

What sustains the work is the refusal to resolve the image afterwards. By keeping the construction in front of the camera, Blanchard gives back to the video a quality that much of digital art today dispenses with, which is that of record. What is seen actually happened, and happened only once.