“As far as I can remember, I feel that I really started to create pictures when I stopped using flat canvas only, may it be a screen or a sheet of paper.

Of course, in addition to the fictional space inherent to any image, there is an actual, physical space within the screen or the sheet of paper. However, the distance between the surface and the body of the viewer always appeared to me as an impassable ocean — even if these two elements are only distant from a few meters.

I started to notice that for some odd reason, adding physical distance between the spectator and the artwork could increase their proximity.

The picture comes from the physical experience of being there. These pictures are not only visible through the eyes, but through the whole body. What’s outside the frame matters as much as what’s inside the frame. The frame, as well as the technical device, disappear.”

The installations of Romain Tardy, which often use the technique of videomapping, are conceived as tangible experiences in situ and use light as a way to enhance existing architecture or original structures.

By examining our relationship to reality as we are confronted by computer imagery and the social changes that it triggers, as well as the way that digital technology is situated in public space, Tardy’s installations seek to evoke these current issues through a poetic approach.

A new city breaks through the canvas of its ancient predecessor. It aggressively transforms, develops, complements and integrates into the historic background. We will explore aspects of the harmonious inclusion of the new architecture into the historical environment through specific examples. Aesthetics and awareness of the urban environment: layers of the city, the value of the an, location, free urban space, ravages of time. We will see what new opportunities modern architectural trends provide. This concerns the difference between pseudo-ecology and actual ecology. We will also talk about samples of new forms and properties of a high quality public space: fully and partially open city atriums, the integration of three-dimensional structures of the environment into a traditional planar city instead of building jungles of tower-shaped skyscrapers.
Summing up, we will discuss life trends of cities, modern and futuristic capabilities of architecture and its relation to humans and nature when turning a historic city into a modern metropolis.