Throughout the history of art, landscape painting has assigned a legibility to the forms of nature. Each of Jacques Perconte's films, on the other hand, invites us to embark on a new perceptive adventure. The paradox of the filmmaker's technique lies in the following proposition: if the computerisation of audiovisual tools is not to impoverish our experience of the living, it is important that this experience should once again become a critical craft of the forms of experience. This is how Perconte's films take us on a sensitive apprenticeship in a different relationship to the living, one based on minute perceptions, a secret life of matter, revealed by a vitalism of technique". Alice Leroy, Jacques Perconte, Paysage Contre Nature, L'art Et Les Formes De La Nature, Collège Des Bernardins.

Born in Grenoble in 1974, Jacques Perconte lives and works between Rotterdam and Paris.

For just over twenty-five years, he has been developing an audiovisual and cinematographic body of work in which the environment and landscape are the vehicles of an aesthetic that disrupts vision as much as the technologies it employs.

His work moves between cinemas, exhibition spaces and the stage. Although Perconte's works take a variety of forms (linear film, generative film, audiovisual performance, print, installation), they are the result of ongoing experimental research.

From Normandy to the peaks of the Alps, from the depths of Scotland to the polders of the Netherlands, he passionately explores and films the elements. The surprising universalism of the form, which seems to hark back visually to what painting was like when it took on nature as a motif, is born of the relationship between the delicate rhythm and apparent gentleness of the subjects and the extreme technicality of the images, which reveal their digital reality in all its dimensions. The energy of Perconte's gesture is inscribed in the image produced by the camera, and is revealed by freeing himself from its constraints through the technological nature of the images.

His exploration of the internet and video in the late 90s led him to lay the foundations of a new aesthetic by being the first artist to work with moving images by hijacking digital compression methods. He is world-renowned for his unique mastery of images.

Jacques Perconte takes us into the very nature of video and the way it is made, and brings us closer to his sensations.

Thanks to reverse engineering and the expert manipulation of coding and storage technologies, Jacques Perconte's hijacking of the high-tech processes of the audiovisual industry goes beyond the technical issue and succeeds in turning his landscapes into colourful fairy-tales 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 the landscape is seen in a new primitiveness made possible by technology: Jacques Perconte reveals "the landscape of the image rather than the image of the landscape". It's an aesthetically novel approach based on the shortcomings of the digital image and part of a reflection on the need for artists to reappropriate technology in the face of the technological determinism of perceptual devices. Using painting, performance art, and cinema as starting points, along with linear or generative works, Jacques Perconte's work takes on new dimensions of sound and documentary in a reinvented relationship with reality.

His work has been shown worldwide in documentary and avant-garde cinemas and festivals (DocFortNight MoMa, Tribeca Film New York; IFFR Rotterdam, Alchemy Scotland, Côté Court France, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, Busan Korea? ), celebrated by critics (Cahiers de cinéma, Critikat, Art Press...), his films have been the subject of several retrospectives and major monographic programmes (Côté Court, 25 ᵉ Invideo Mostra de Milan, Silencio Paris...). In 2014-15, the Cinémathèque Française devoted the avant-garde cycle to him under the name "soleils". In 2012, Léos Carax invited her to take part in his film Holy Motors. In 2019, Jean-Luc Godard used an extract from his film Après le feu in the Livre d'images.

Discovering the work of Jacques Perconte is like taking a trip to a land of magical landscapes where time expands. Colours burst forth from all sides. The image becomes pictorial matter, transforming the cinema screen into a veritable painting. Smaranda Olcèse

Over the last fifteen years or so, the link with research has been strengthened. Firstly, with the work that Bidhan Jacobs undertook in his thesis ("Towards an aesthetics of the signal. dynamics of blur and liberation of code in film art") and then with the work of Nicole Brenez, Vincent Sorrel, Antonio Somaini, Vincent Deville, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Megan Phipps, Fred Brayard, Muriel Tinnel-Temple, Sean Cubitt, Yves Citton, Alice Leroy... all of whom have become key players in the development of Jacques Perconte's approach.

His videos and infinite films, generative explorations of his research and impressions, are presented in solo 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 (Musée d'Evreux, 2024, Centre Pompidou: Paris, 2021; Palazzo del Governatore: Parma 2020; Museum of Contemporary Art: Shenzhen 2019; Polytechnic Museum: Moscow, 2019; Royal Abbey: Saint-Riquier 2017; Paul Dini Museum: Villefranche-sur-Saône, 2011; Graphic Arts Museum: Machida 2005...).

In 2016, he was selected along with a dozen other living artists to work alongside the landscape paintings of Gustave Courbet in the exhibition Courbet et la nature at the remarkable Abbaye d'Auberive. In 2022, he will present 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 offered him a thousand square metres for a major solo exhibition. In 2024, it was at the Générateur in Gentilly and at L'abbaye de Noirlac that he once again presented monumental works, and that the question of how to present his images in space was addressed.

Although he did some audiovisual performances in the early 2000s, it was only ten years later that he returned to the stage with some prestigious musical collaborations (Jean-Benoît Dunckel, Jeff Mills, Mikhail Rudy, Onceim, among others). These projects are presented on some of the finest stages in France (Maison de la Musique: Nanterre, 2019; Église Saint Mery: Paris, 2020; Philharmonie: Paris, 2015; Cathédrale de Sarlat, 2016; le rocher Palmer: Cenon, 2014...) and internationally. The 2022-23 season will see the presentation of the new "tant que la Montagne" project with the 34 musicians of ONCEIM (Orchestre de Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations Musicale).

In 2017, with the company miroirs étendus and composer Othman Louati, he created the opera Vidéo Faust, an ambitious adaptation of Berlioz. In 2020, with choreographer Fabrice Lambert, he will make the show Seconde Nature.

Collaborations are an important part of Perconte's practice. These include filmmakers, composers, musicians, and poets. 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, and Vidal Bini should be added.

As a member of the generation that saw the birth of the internet, networks have always played an essential role in his work, and although the internet is no longer seen as an artistic issue today, Jacques Perconte's online presence remains essential. The documentation of his work is abysmal.

As nothing about the machine is foreign to him, he provokes it, pushes it to its limits, thinks from its inadequacies and creates according to its errors... Jacques Perconte's aesthetic anchoring claims the powers of impression, in both phenomenological and pictorial senses". Nicole Brenez, film historian and curator of avant-garde cinema at the Cinémathèque Française.