Oculus Zebra

Second panel in 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 the opposite: how bring a surface to life surface that is not, in principle, only black and white?

The the answer lies in the rejection of this black and white. Look at nearby: 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 belong to no zebra, and which, assembled, produce exactly the sheen of a coat under the light. The dark bands, they mix browns, blacks, warm grays, earth tones and blues deep. None 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 do not can no longer tell where the animal begins. Translated into bricks, this blurring redoubles, and it is necessary a real setback for than the snout, plays, the muzzle set up. Then, in the center, the eye lights up—a hot point of ambers, of oranges and coppers, the sole accent truly saturated of the painting. Every composition, all that din of stripes, exists only to to bring it there.

The pointillism is not not a figure of the style here is method. By reducing the module to its smallest small unit, BBB recaptures the gesture of painters who placed the color in dots without ever mixing, allowing 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 retrospect.

No brick was placed according to a plan. Each element was chosen for the by hand, in a stock LEGO® bricks second-hand arrived in bulk from across France and sorted one to one—one of which partly sourced from solidarity reuse through the association Replayed. Pieces without a story that come across one. To this fineness of the weave, the the quantity of pieces handled counts in the tens of thousands: this artwork will can ever be remade. identical.

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