Pixel letters

Even more than the subjects treated, technique is, in Art, defining style. In the Hommes de lettres series, technique is everything. Art is a matter of process, as with Raymond Roussel. There is an original idea at the start and then the artist can follow up and say, like Warhol, "I am a machine". In these pixel art drawings, the pixel is a letter. A letter that is always monochrome like a pixel. Otherwise it would be far too easy. And the technique is to make portraits that look like one by drawing in Illustrator with these non-square pixels. Which is a lot of white to deal with. Especially in the pupils and irises. These handmade works on the computer thus look like embroidery or marquetry.

Each colour has its own layer and that's it. Thus, for pure pleasure, a Rimbaud was drawn by the text of the Bateau Ivre, a Baudelaire by the Albatross, a Captain Haddock sketched by a wave of insults or a Marilyn Monroe immortalised by dolls. Pablo Picasso, Simone Weil, Winston Churchill and several other great Europeans have also been executed in the same vein and as part of a commission from the Council of Europe.

Of course, it is in a giant format that this form of pixel art has its full effect. From a distance, it is an image, up close it is a text that is discovered in a second time. Kiss cool effect. A Strasbourg project for a king-size portrait of Rouget de Lisle drawn by La Marseillaise on a city wall where the French national anthem was composed got stuck in the municipal pipes frozen by Covid and reconfigured by the elections. But the pixels, one suspects, have not said their last word.