AD.VM.AV.IA – 13

Basic Information

Title: AD.VM.AV.IA – 13
Artist(s): Vera Molnar aurèce vettier
Date Created: 2023
Edition Info: #3/4
Framed Dimensions: 24.25 x 20.25 in.
Unframed Dimensions: 23.75 x 19.75 in.
Medium:
Inventory ID: Molnar/Vettier-2023-01

Description

signed and numbered 3/4 lower right in graphite

AD.VM.AV.IA, on the other side of the polyhedron (1514-2023)
Collaboration between Vera Molnár and aurèce vettier
Text and curation by Vincent Baby

Based on a detail -the representation of a polyhedron- from Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencholia (1514), Vera Molnár and aurèce vettier have imagined an installation assisted by Artificial Intelligence.

AD.VM.AV.IA is the acronym of the protagonists at work in the creation of this installation shown at Transfo in Paris, for Nuit Blanche 2023

This groundbreaking collaboration between Vera Molnár and aurèce vettier grew out of a shared fascination for this famous engraving, and more specifically for the enigmatic polyhedron it contains, which dominates the left-hand side of the print.

Standing on the other side of Dürer’s polyhedron, what would we see? This geometric and poetic question posed by the two artists was an opportunity to establish a dialogue and generate shapes. By assembling artificial intelligence algorithms trained on the corpus of Albrecht Dürer and his preparatory sketches, and leveraging their generative capacities, aurèce vettier offered Vera Molnár a veritable dataset: simili-gravures of an unseen kind, offering dozens of speculative formalizations, imagined from the point of view of a viewer placed behind the polyhedron.

More or less ambiguous spaces appear: under vaults, near arcades, framed by trees or columns, monastic interiors or landscapes populated by surprisingly shaped plants and animals, witnesses to atmospheric phenomena no less so. The light, alternately solar or lunar, generates extremely varied shadows and reflections that accompany or disrupt, glaze or warm, punctuate or disorganize the surfaces of this mysterious object, but deliver, at the center, the sought-after, hoped-for phantasmatic figure: the hidden face of the polyhedron. Entering Dürer’s engraving to return with the AI this element that fascinated them both, the artists selected together 16 variations of the hidden face of the polyhedron that best conformed to the complex motivation of their common expectation: that of being surprised and enchanted.

Finally, as part of the Nuit Blanche program, three polyhedral structures, reduced to their fluorescent edges and freed from any figurative context, will be unveiled under a paradoxical Black Light, offering night-walkers yet another way of seeing and feeling the strangeness of these forms, and giving birth to a desire to communicate what these images do for them: what kind of impression?

Vincent Baby
June 2023

image of artwork: (c) Photo by Romain Darnaud, Courtesy of the artist and ADAGP
portrait of Vera Molnár and aurèce vettier: (c) Photo by Vincent Baby

 

Detail images of the work

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