Oculus Zebra

Second panel of the series Oculus. Same framing, same pattern tiny, even gaze that holds you — but a subject that changes everything. Where the the giraffe offered a a coat made for color, the zebra poses the problem opposite: how make a surface that is not, in principle, only black and white?

The the answer lies in the rejection of this black and white. Look closely at up close: the stripes light ones are not never white. They are pink, mauves, lavender, ivory, pearl gray, sand, pale turquoise — an accumulation of pastel shades that do not belong to no zebra, and which assembled, produce exactly the sheen of a coat under the light. The dark bands, they blend browns, blacks, warm grays, earth tones and blues deep. No pure color, never. It is by rejecting the two colors expected than Brick Board Builder gets the real one.

The result is a image that holds up. The the zebra's striped pattern is camouflage, a optical blurring: nature designed it so that we don't no longer distinguishes where the animal begins. Translated into bricks, this blurring doubles, and it is necessary a real setback for than the muzzle, the plays, the chamfer put in place. Then, at the center, the eye lights up - a warm spot of ambers, of oranges and coppers, the sole accent truly saturated of the painting. Every composition, all that din of scratches, exists only to bring it there.

The pointillism is not not a figure of style here is the method. By reducing the module at its most small unit, BBB recaptures the gesture of painters who applied the color in dots without ever mixing, leaving the the viewer's eye care to create the synthesis. Each brick is a touch, each row a hesitation, and the image takes shape than in the distance.

No brick was laid out according to a plan. Each element was selected for the by hand, in a stock LEGO® bricks second-hand arrivals in bulk from all over France and sorted one one — including one partly sourced from solidarity reuse thanks to the association Replayed. Pieces without a story that find one another. At this fineness of pattern, the quantity of handled pieces are numbers in the tens of thousands: this the artwork can can ever be remade. identical.

Nor print, nor reproduction, nor intelligence artificial. An constructed artwork, numbered and delivered with its certificate of authenticity and signed on the back.