Interventions – Eltono

Oriflammes

Bourdeilles, France
June 2022

Project realized in collaboration with the town of Bourdeilles and the Dordogne-Périgord Departmental Cultural Agency.

Upon the invitation of the Departmental Cultural Agency and the town of Bourdeilles, I have conceived a series of graphic compositions for the Grand Rue, the main street in the village. This work involved participatory workshops with over seventy residents. This installation marks the official launch of a collective consultation initiated by the municipality regarding the future urban and landscape redevelopment of the town.

I collaborated with primary school students, volunteers, as well as residents from the La Prada medical center and the Les Deux Séquoias nursing home. Using architectural elements, I created twenty-four shapes and defined a color palette. I introduced participants to a graphic and playful protocol where choices were based on the results of dice rolls. Each number corresponded to a shape, an orientation, and a color. The dice throws generated over two hundred motifs, allowing me to compose the banners.

Participants, from 6 to 101 years old:
Erinne, Emma, Lisa, Elvin, Antoine, Loup, Luther, Arthur, Joseph, Alice, Margot, Abel, Céline, Guy, Patrick, Elie, Nolan, Solange, Chantal, Alexis, Killyan, John, Jessica, Clara, Nathalie, Pierre, Paulette, Simone, Hameury, Jean-Claude, Marie, Alain, Christine, Nicolas, Maria, Marie-Colette, Joan, Lorenzo, Thomas, Camille, Soyann, Flore, Sasha, Maëlys, Ethan, Adèle, Yoann, Jaja, Hugo, Jules V, Léo, Lulu, Océane, Elisa, Léon, Jules F, Mélissa, Eywa, Ladig, Kyllian, along with their teachers and activity leaders.

Production:
Bourdeilles Town Hall & Dordogne-Périgord Departmental Cultural Agency – 2022

Photos: Eltono

Averses

Hangar 107 Art Center
Rouen, France
July 2021

Artworks created for the solo show Sérendipité: www.eltono.com/exhibitions/solo/serendipite

Averses (rain showers)

Following my researches around the idea of artwork alteration with uncontrolled external factors, I decided to take advantage of the Normandy weather to walk around the art center each time it was raining, protecting myself under an artwork. The colored parallel lines sequence traced with felt pens are defaced by the water drips which make the ink bleed. because the exposition time is the same for each outing, the characteristics of each rain shower can be clearly seen in the result. Big spaced drops, light rain or strong rain shower all leave a different imprint on the ink.

Thanks to all the Hangar 107 crew, Jean Guillaume, Nicolas, Marc, Kim, Théo, Caro, Marilou and Gabin.

Pictures: Juan Cruz, Jean Guillaume Panis and Eltono.

G.A.S.

Horizontal printing system using street movements. Each print is exposed to traffic for at least one hour.

Photos: Eric Surmont et Eltono
Videos: Victor Thiré

Desperfectos

SET Espai d’Art (at Galería Nueva)
Madrid, Spain
October 2021

For the solo show Desperfectos, I presented three projects: Plotter de paseo (walking plotter), Transportistas (shippers) y Chaparrones (rain showers).

Plotter de Paseo (Walking plotter)

Following my research around the idea of making art while walking, I made a walking plotter that uses gravity and my body’s movements to activate some mechanisms and create drawings from my paths.

Transportistas (shippers)

I built five boxes to ship five artworks from my studio in France to the gallery in Madrid. A box is meant to protect the art, but I painted the art on the outside of it. Instead of protecting, the box helps the deterioration of the art. I imagined this project as a collaboration between the shipping companies and me. I built, painted and handled the boxes with maximum care until the very moment I handed them over to the shipper. At that point I lost control of their condition. I was only able to discover the result when I arrived at the gallery in Madrid.

– T1 and T2 were sent with La Poste (Colissimo),
– T3 was sent with TNT,
– T4 was sent with UPS,
– T5 was sent with DHL.

Chaparrones (Rain showers)

Artworks created for the solo show Sérendipité at the Hangar 107 Art Center in Rouen in July 2021.

Set Espai d’Art
Galería Nueva

More information: https://galerianueva.com/galerias/setespaidart/

Sérendipité

Hangar 107 Art Center
Rouen, France
July 2021

For the Sérendipité (serendipity) solo show, I presented eight bodies of work: two generative mural paintings, four street experimentations, one interactive mural installation and a generative sculptures project.

Averses (rain showers)

SM7

The SM7 sculptures are a reiteration of the Modo n.°7 protocol using volume. Eight different shapes are generated and laid out so the sculpture is stable. Once the balance is found, the molded pieces are assembled and the sculpture is fixed.

55 panneaux (55 panels)

Following a generative protocol, 55 abstract compositions were painted on 50 x 50 cm wood panels. The hanging system allows to easily move the pieces around. This way, all along the duration of the show, the public can switch the panel around to make the composition evolves.

Modo n.°46

Puting the technological breakthrough of NFT in generative art to good use, I uploaded a code online so 16 collectors could generate 16 digital abstract compositions. Each one of them was painted in a cell following the generation order. The final result was discovered at the end of the painting because no simulation of the complete composition was made.

https://www.eltono.com/lab/projects/modo46/

RUFO

An abstract composition is painted on a wood board and a rope is attached to it. I walk the board, painted face towards the floor, on a looping route that has been defined beforehand. The result is discovered at the end of the loop. In Rouen, I chose to walk eight boards on paths going through the docks and bridges around the Seine river.

Modo n.°45 (Modo n.°7 reiteration)

After discovering a perfect 7×7 grid on the central freestanding wall, we painted the generative wall painting Modo n.°45 following the Modo n.°7 protocol.

Pierres peintes (painted rocks)

When I arrived at the art center, I went outside to look for rocks. Each rock was painted with three different color coats. The rocks were then brought to the right bank of Rouen and I kicked them to make them roll following predefined paths. Some of them were dropped in the Mont-Saint-Aignan slopes and one, the biggest, rolled on the left bank around the art center.

Détours

Random paths (x5) were executed in Niort in 2017 for the show La Ville et le Mouvement curated by Winterlong Gallery.

For a predefined time, I wander in the city with a dice in my pocket. At each street intersection, I roll the dice to decide where to go next. The GPS data of the path is recorded and a sculpture is made out of the result. The sculptures are shown like abstract artworks resulting of my movement in the city.

Overview of the show:

Thanks to all the Hangar 107 crew, Jean Guillaume, Nicolas, Marc, Kim, Théo, Caro, Marilou and Gabin.

Pictures: Juan Cruz, Jean Guillaume Panis and Eltono.

Détours Chaumont

Chaumont, France
September 2020

Invited for the Saisons Culturelles by the Cultural Department of the city of Chaumont, I spent 10 days painting in the streets of the city center to create a graphic itinerary. I painted a total of 55 small and discreet pieces. A booklet has been edited by the city so residents and visitors can go on a quest to find them. The booklets are available at the following venue : Hôtel de Ville (City Council), tourist office, médiathèque Les Silos, the museums and Le Signe Centre National du Graphisme.

saisonsculturelleschaumont.fr/evenement/detours-eltono

Funambuls

Casal Solleric
Passeig del Born 27, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
April 2018

Curated by Jordi Pallarès

Mouldings:

Palma is full of architectural and decorative elements as interesting as they are peculiar. The artist select some of them to reproduced the space they generate cutting the three-dimensional negative space of these geometric fragments. They are shapes that one could easily touch and perfectly recognize with his finger. Wooden mouldings that the artist makes us locate and fit in while we discover others. A different look on the city aesthetic.

Rub:

One of the smallest street in the city has been intervened by the artist. Blue, red and green. The participants have to find it, rub their black backpacks on it and impregnate them with these colors. A dust that they will release immediately on the exhibition space walls with another body rub. A loading and downloading exercise where the contact of the body with the wall connects us with the city activity and leave some traces that talk about our presence in it. A subtle collective “pollination” that, beyond the possible accidents, wants to eliminate borders between indoor and outdoor while it gives back respect to the others and towards what’s on our back.

Random Itineraries:

By throwing a dice you can randomly stroll around the city. Randomness leads us into streets that we don’t usualy know while we’re playing and tracing the generated itinerary on a map. Absurd and persistent, open or closed, these broken lines show our activity when we act as funambulist. Geometric and irregular routes that, magnifying their scale, are reassigned and reinterpreted by the artist in the exhibition space.

Petrogliphs:

Following clues, the idea is to find images or signs that others carved in the walls’ stones. A calcareous stone typical from the Balearic Islands that register every type of interventions and erosion of the passing time. Walls where suggestive anonymous traces are detected and reproduced on paper. An activity that gives the opportunity to discover incisions as footprints accumulated by those that coincided in the same place transcending (beyond) time.

Chalk Line:

This activity consists in the making of a collective, generative and random mural drawing full of uncertain straight lines. Using the chalk line as a classic tool used in construction work, each participant marks a line that is the result of joining the coordinates of two points. Dice randomness choose the length and inclination of each line while the whip of the historic blue pigment marks the wall. The same pigment that is used to whitened clothes. Personalized distances that are traced with tension and liable to be returned to the street.

Exhibition view:

Pictures: Jordi Pallarès, Yago Marqués and Eltono
Graphic design: Javier Siquier

Palma Residency

Palma Festival
Le Pavillon, Caen, France
March 2018

www.palmafestival.com

15 days residency at the Pavillon on the tip of the Caen Peninsula.

Tourbillons:

Crossing the Orne river one day using the Orne-Boom (a boom built in 1908 that is used to regulate the tide) I realized that in font of each door, on the downstream side, the water was forming very powerful whirlpools. The next time I crossed the bridge I saw that the debris that had been floating the day before was still turning around in the same place. I understood that the whirlpools were so strong that any objects caught in them could barely escape. So, I decided to throw some art in one of the strongest whirlpools and see what would happen. After 5 days I decided to get them back and, after quite a lot of trouble, I managed to fish them all out of the water and bring them back to the exhibition space.

Random routes:

“Le Pavillon”, the venue where my residency took place and where I showed the results of my experiments in the street, is situated on the tip of the Caen Peninsula. It’s a very interesting area because it is surrounded by water (the St. Pierre Bassin, the Caen à la Mer Canal, the Orne river and the Victor Hugo canal) and currently it’s in the middle of a huge urban transformation. Modern constructions, old factories, abandoned buildings, designed green areas and waste land are all mixed together. This makes it an open space, well defined and perfect for aleatory wandering.

For this exercise, I defined 23 points at key spots around the area (building angles, crossroads and corners). The goal was to walk from one point to another choosing at random the next point. The route started at point n.º1, had to go through 10 points and finished again at point n.º1. The result of each stroll generated a design that was then converted into a wood sculpture using a laser at the local Dôme Fablab. Finally, I painted and exhibited them at the Pavillon. I traced 11 routes myself and 6 were traced by the participants of a workshop with the Fablab. Each sculpture represents a 30 to 40 minutes stroll on a distance from 2 to 3 km.