Jean-Vincent
Simonet

CONTAMINATE AND DIVERT — NEITHER PHOTOGRAPH NOR PAINTING

VISUAL ART

Jean-Vincent Simonet is a French digital photographer and visual artist born in 1991 who graduated from École Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne in 2014. His practice exists at the crossroads of old photographic techniques, new digital technologies, collage, editing, sculpture, and painting, fusing analogue images, digital techniques, collage, montage, sculpture and painting with remarkable fluidity. Coming from a family of printers, he has a special relationship with the printing industry and works to "contaminate" and "divert" photography to free it from its digital constraints. His work is characterized by a sense of overload and exuberance with a penchant for sheer entropy, where body and decor, nature and artifice, poses and emotions collide and merge. He transforms digital photographs through physical intervention, using water, primers, chalk, and various tools to modify surfaces, creating works that strive to transcend their condition as photographs without ever quite becoming paintings. Based between Paris and Zurich, his work has been exhibited at renowned institutions including FOAM Amsterdam and Fotomuseum Winterthur.