The 21st century is a pivotal time where many artistic revolutions are fighting battles. The physical works try to keep their places in the hearts of collectors, while the conceptual tends more and more towards the speculative and the ephemeral. This has been the case in particular for a few years with the emergence of virtual worlds and NFTs (Non-Fungible Token) which allow us an almost infinite dematerialized free expression. This brilliant medium that is digital offers everyone the possibility of pushing back certain limits hitherto insurmountable and continues to make our lives easier by making us gain in universality, visibility, freedom, but also in creativity.
Nowadays, the notion of artist becomes more and more blurred because of this multitude of possibilities. According to Andy Warhol, art is a collection of everything that allows us to escape. This vision, coupled with the arrival of new technologies, naturally pushes us to review this too often sacralized term and to consider a definition somewhat different from its original etymology. The artist is no longer a craftsman obliged to go through a rigorous academic training, he becomes a title within the reach of whoever wants to be. A question that I sometimes ask myself is : what kind of artist would Biard have been in our time ? A photo-reporter traveling around the world ? A satirical press illustrator ? A painter with a nostalgic soul in search of romanticism ? Or maybe all of these ?
A few days ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to test the beta version of a website called DALL.E 2 ! This artificial intelligence is a perfect example of this universal creation because it is capable of generating realistic and artistic images from a simple description. No need to have imagination because the internet has it for us ! Thanks to this tool, I wanted to slip, for the time of an article, into the skin of a Biard 2.0 to continue to bring his work to life, while imagining the most realistic possible follow-up to his paintings. The first desire here is to deconstruct the barriers imposed by these enormous golden frames, in order to imagine what the artist did not dare to represent. The principle is simple, just upload an image, type a few keywords and the program does the rest. A virtual off-screen then takes shape in a few clicks, giving a fantasized vision of what could have been ! Here are some examples below.
It's quite incredible to see these paintings transform in a few seconds and give birth to completely new compositions. If the spirit of Biard is always present, the narration is sometimes very different. The landscapes expand, new characters appear and the main subject now becomes secondary. It only took me a few minutes to spend my free credits and it's quite frustrating that I can't keep going forever... In a month I'll be able to pretend to be a genius artist again and I won't miss to update this article in order to offer you my new "creations" !
