The soul of dots

Artist Luz Blanco uses dots to give shape to her art works while Ludovic Bernhardt tries to blur the boundaries which divide nation through graphical representations. They speak to Shrabasti Mallik

From a distance you can easily identify the artwork as the iconic scene from Satyajit Ray's movie Charulata, where the protagonist looks through her hand-held binoculars. Go closer and you will find a series of dots clustered around lines by French artist Luz Blanco. Similarly, there is a map of India, which can be identified from a distance but blurs when you move closer. It is a digital representation made by another French artist Ludovic Bernhardt. In an exhibition at India International Centre titled Inside, these two artists have attempted to show that technology, too, has a soul.

Two of Blanco's artworks titled Maiden with Unicorn were very intriguing, owing to the fact that they were dot painted (one in black ink and the other in red) on a piece of cloth. It was derived from a medieval tale that only a young virgin can touch and catch a unicorn. "The unicorn is a very strong and poetical symbol of sexuality and also a kind of ancestral Eden in which sexuality is represented like a magical act," she explained.

The dots that she uses to express her art is complicated and requires a considerable amount of concentration. "It is a slow and meditative work," she said and explained that the art is influenced to a certain extent by the hyper realistic style and art form of the 70s, which questioned the mechanical process of making images. "And my work is also in the mid way of embroidery and computer. When I draw, the image doesn't appear immediately and reveal itself with time, when the drawing is finished," she elaborates. That is why everything is readable from a certain distance, and disappears when the picture comes closer. "It is like a memory which seems sometimes clear and sometimes confusing and unclear," she said.

One of her exhibits titled Fragments of Memory is made of two long rolls of paper with a triangular image. There is a small gap between the two sheets of paper which disrupts the image from the middle. Blanco explained, "For this drawing we understand that it misses some parts of it, the presence of the space talks about oblivion (forgetfulness). This image is not iconic like the others. It's just a fragment which seems to have difficulties to recover, to find, its context. It is lost in a big paper roll that symbolises the hidden folds of memory."

For her series of Charulata paintings, she has placed personal photographs in front of stills picked up from the movie and explored feminine ideas. According to her, cinema is a means of production of collective, heteroclite, dazzling and anonymous memories. She said, "I'm very touched by Charulata. What is powerful in this movie is the identity of a woman, who becomes an artist and a writer. Like a revelation to surpass our own barriers, obstacles, and doubts."

The artist believes that the question of memory or recollection is a paradoxical one. It involves that which we want memory to retain or not to retain. Additionally, memory can be compared to oblivion, sort of a sensitive balance, or rather a pure reconstruction of reality. She tries to create a dialogue between memory and oblivion through her work. "Each image I create has a paradox between clearness and disappearance. The more we are close, the less we are able to read it. When we are far we can read it clearly. Like memory, which contains huge fault of oblivion," she said.

A chunk of Bernhardt's work is a representation of maps from all across the world. He begins by picking up the map from the Internet and then disturbs it with a digital process. "After that I copy it on paper by hand. I use a grid to reproduce exactly the digital map on the paper. It is like a copyist exercise from a digital file," he explained. It is a long process, with one piece sometimes taking about a month to complete.

When we asked him about the origin of the technique, he smiled and said that it is his own creation, "my own approach." But he also added that he is influenced by Italian artist Boetti.

His maps are graphic and drawing where international boundaries do not have the possibility of being read or understood. He wishes to make the boundaries disappear. "I want to blur them, so that all the information, cities, borders, that normally we use for location, disappear," he said and added that his goal is to unify the nation state differences, and create a utopian land or map without those lines of separation.

One wall of the gallery is dedicated to graphical representations of 24 Indian lakes like Pulicat, Dal, Shukhna, Kankaria and Sursagar lakes. It is a project that Bernhardt made in his computer to give it a very graphic, digital art effect. The interesting part was how the first picture starts with a bright yellow colour and seamlessly changes to orange, coral, red and finally pink. "It's quite a very simple organisation of colours, like a painter can do with his own palette. It is also like a spectrum color effect, freely applied to the lakes' shapes," he said, confessing that he had never been to any of the lakes. He explained, "They are like a fantasy. But their shapes are authentically reproduced from digital maps."

There are also representations of the north and south Hemispheres but they have been presented differently. "It's also a digital production design," he told us. The Hemispheres have been turned into Rorschach psycho test motives. "For me, geography is not an exact science, but an ideological representation of the world. A map is not a reality, it's a fiction, and often it's an ideological fiction. It is a representation of the world, not its reality," he added.