Born in Grenoble in 1974, Jacques Perconte lives and works between Rotterdam and Paris.
For just over twenty-five years, he has developed an audiovisual and cinematographic body of work where the environment and landscape are vehicles for an aesthetic that challenges both vision and the technologies it employs.
His work navigates between cinema screens, exhibition spaces, and the stage. His creations, although they take on various forms (linear film, generative film, audiovisual performance, print, installation), are the result of ongoing experimental research.
“Throughout art history, landscape painting assigns readability to the forms of nature. Each film by Jacques Perconte invites us, on the contrary, to a new perceptual adventure. This paradox of technique in the filmmaker’s work lies in the following proposition: for the computerisation of audiovisual tools not to mean a diminishment of our experience of the living world, it is crucial that it becomes a critical craftsmanship of experiential forms. This is how Perconte's films draw us into the sensitive learning of a different relationship with the living, made of subtle perceptions, a secret life of matter revealed by a vitalism of technique.”
Alice Leroy - Jacques Perconte, Landscape Against Nature, Art and the Forms of Nature - Collège Des Bernardins
From Normandy to the peaks of the Alps, from the depths of Scotland to the Dutch polders, he passionately traverses and films the elements. The striking formal universalism, which visually seems to hark back to what painting was when it captured nature as a motif, is born from the relationship between the delicate rhythm and the apparent softness of the subjects and the extreme technicality of the images that manifest in all their dimensions their digital reality. The energy of his gesture is inscribed in the image crafted by the camera and is revealed by freeing itself from its constraints through the technological nature work of the images.
The exploration with internet computing and video at the end of the 1990s led him to lay the foundations of a new aesthetic, being the first artist to work with moving images by diverting digital compression methods. He is globally renowned for his unique mastery of images.
Jacques Perconte brings us into the very nature of video and its fabrication to find new proximities with its sensations.
Thanks to reverse engineering and expert manipulation of coding and storage technologies, the diversion of high-tech processes in the audiovisual industry by Jacques Perconte transcends the technical question and succeeds in making his landscapes into spectacles of colour whose critical and popular success continues to grow.
This work is part of a critical history of representations, from painting to cinema. The tradition of landscape is envisioned in a new primitiveness enabled by technology: Jacques Perconte reveals to us 'the landscape of the image rather than the image of the landscape.' It’s an aesthetically unprecedented approach, stemming from the imperfections of digital imagery, that is part of a reflection on the necessary reappropriation of technique by artists in the face of the technological determinism of perception devices. Additionally, from painting, performance, cinema, with linear or generative works, the work of Jacques Perconte takes on new dimensions, sound, documentary, in reinvented relationships with reality.
Widely shown in documentary and avant-garde film theatres and festivals (DocFortnight MoMa, Tribeca Film New York, IFFR Rotterdam, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Côté Court, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, BUSAN International Film Festival…), celebrated by critics (Cahiers du cinéma, Critikat, Art Press…), his films have been the subject of several retrospectives and major monographic programs (Côté Court, 25th Invideo Mostra of Milan, Silencio Paris…).
In 2014-15, the Cinémathèque française dedicated the avant-garde cycle named Soleils to him. In 2012, Léos Carax invited him to participate in his film Holy Motors. In 2019, Jean-Luc Godard used an excerpt from his film Après le feu in Le Livre d’image.
“Discovering the work of Jacques Perconte is like embarking on a journey in a land of magical landscapes where time stretches. Colours burst from all sides. The image becomes a pictorial material to transform the cinema screen into a true painting.”
For the past fifteen years, the connection with research has strengthened. Initially, with the work that Bidhan Jacobs initiated in his thesis (Towards an Aesthetics of the Signal. Dynamics of Blur and Liberation of Code in Film Arts) then with those of Nicole Brenez, Vincent Sorrel, Antonio Somaini, Vincent Deville, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Megan Phipps, Fred Brayard, Muriel Tinel-Temple, Sean Cubitt, Yves Citton, Alice Leroy… who truly become actors in the development of Jacques Perconte’s approach.
His videos, infinite films, generative explorations of his research, and his prints are presented in personal exhibitions (Générateur : Gentilly, 2024; Abbaye de Noirlac, 2024; Lieu Unique : Nantes, 2023; Musée Faure: Aix-les-Bains, 2019; Collège des Bernardins: Paris, 2014; Prieuré Saint-Pierre: Pont-Saint-Esprit, 2014; Musée d’art moderne André Malraux: Le Havre 2015; Galerie Charlot: Paris, 2012-13-14-15-23) or collective ones (Musée d’Évreux, 2024; Centre Pompidou: Paris, 2021; Palazzo del Governatore: Parma, 2020; Musée d’art contemporain: Shenzhen, 2019; Musée polytechnique: Moscow, 2019; Abbaye royale: Saint-Riquier, 2017; Musée Paul Dini: Villefranche-sur-Saône, 2011; Musée d’arts graphiques: Machida, 2005…).
In 2016, he was selected along with a dozen living artists to accompany the landscape paintings of Gustave Courbet in the exhibition Courbet et la nature at the remarkable Abbaye d’Auberive. In 2022, he presented for six months a new monumental video work for the French presidency of the European Union at the Council of Europe in Brussels. In 2023, the Lieu Unique in Nantes provided him with a thousand square metres for a large monographic exhibition. In 2024, it is at the Générateur in Gentilly and at the Abbaye de Noirlac that he again proposes monumental works and tackles the issue of spatial arrangement of his images.
Although he gave a few audiovisual performances in the early 2000s, it was only ten years later that he returned to the stage with prestigious musical collaborations (Jean-Benoît Dunckel, Jeff Mills, Mikhail Rudy, the ONCEIM, among others). These projects are presented on some of the most beautiful stages in France (Maison de la musique: Nanterre, 2019; Église Saint-Merry: Paris, 2020; Philharmonie: Paris, 2015; Cathédrale de Sarlat, 2016; le Rocher de Palmer: Cenon, 2014…) and internationally. In the 2022-23 season, the new project Tant que la montagne is presented with the 34 musicians of the ONCEIM (Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicale).
In 2017, with the company Miroirs étendus and composer Othman Louati, he created the video opera Faust, an ambitious adaptation of Berlioz. In 2020, with choreographer Fabrice Lambert, he created the show Seconde Nature.
Collaborations are an essential part of his practice. He works with filmmakers, composers, musicians, and poets. In addition to those already mentioned, he collaborates with Julien Desprez, Samuel André, Julien Ribeil, Hélène Breschand, Eric-Maria Couturier, Julie Rousse, Michel Herreria, Didier Arnaudet, Marc Em, Hugo Verlinde, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Eddie Ladoire, Mélaine Dalibert, Simonluca Laitempergher, Vidal Bini.
Because he belongs to the generation that saw the birth of the internet, networks have always played an important role in his work, and although today, the internet no longer appears as an artistic question, the online presence of Jacques Perconte remains highly significant. The documentation of his work is vast.
“Since nothing about the machine is unfamiliar to him, he challenges it, pushes it to its limits, thinks from its shortcomings and creates based on its errors. … the aesthetic grounding of Jacques Perconte claims the powers of impression, in both phenomenological and pictorial senses.”
Nicole Brenez, film historian and head of avant-garde cinema conservation at the Cinémathèque française
