Making art within the junctures of nature

Opus sectile needs the bending, the modification of natural order as a fundamental logic for the sake of creating something else. The main difference between such ancient technique and mosaics is that the latter, working in a similar way to contemporary digital pictures, consist of tesserae whose original shapes do not matter in the end. These are made so small and visually disconnected that could be theoretically replaced by others without losing anything in terms of significance. Opus sectile, instead, demands a higher understanding of materials, of their patterns, shapes and behaviour once cut and put together. If mosaics can be enjoyed only from a distance, in the same way a digital picture implicitly demands the viewer to stay far enough from the monitor in order to not see every single pixels that compose it, opus sectile works are beautiful both as the result of the work of skilled artisans and in virtue of the materials used in the first place. You can go close to an opus sectile and you would still be amazed at the beauty of the stones and marbles selected by the artist.
Opus sectile represents a gentle, collaborative approach to nature; the artisans interrogate the materials in order to ensure these can help them create something new, the composition. It’s not too different from the way traditional Far Eastern cooks use chopsticks; to quote Roland Barthes (“The Empire of Signs”, 1983):

“[Oriental] cook’s long chopsticks never pierce, cut, or slit, never wound but only select, rum, shift. For the chopsticks, in order to divide, must separate, part, peck, instead of cutting, and piercing, in the manner of our implements; they never violate the foodstuff: either they gradually unravel it (in the case of vegetables) or else prod it into separate pieces (in the case of fish, eels), thereby rediscovering the natural of the substance (in this, much closer to the primitive finger than to the knife).”

Such relentless research for the junctures in nature is the same that animates the approach of aurèce vettier. It is through an insightful observation of how plants exist that the collective finds a way to insert their intervention in the intersections of nature’s organic life cycles; instead of cutting through the forest and pick up branches still attached to the trees, aurèce vettier become as less visible as possible by going on a silent quest in the wild looking for what is already at disposal on the ground, without lacerating any trees or bushes. Once found what they were looking for, these branches and leaves that were going to be recycled by nature are instead collected, labelled, analysed, and kept as important specimens.

Opus sectile artisans knew what stones and rocks would have been perfect for their compositions but had to conciliate their expectations with the randomness of the materials that were available in reality. One can’t force nature to generate this and that kind of stone with the features needed to make a work of art; instead, the wise artisans had to look for what were the options that were the closest to what they needed and be inspired by the geometry and shape they found in the wild and change their original plans after what was at their disposal.

aurèce vettier use what nature made available to them in order to create something that the organic world had not imagined yet. The branches, leaves and all the other botanical specimens that come out of their 21st century alchemical laboratory are a joy for the public, whether they are experts in natural sciences or not. In both cases, aurèce vettier’s works lead the viewers to question where he already saw certain features of those algorithmically-generated branch and leaves, offering him the opportunity to enjoy them both as new, unprecedented realities, and by highlighting those aspects that made the artists select certain original specimens in the forest. It’s through the work of the collective that the junctures of nature, the way the organic world offers itself to be explored, are revealed and made available to the public through oil paintings, museum-quality prints, bronze sculptures or pieces of furniture, in the same way opus sectile compositions should be enjoyed as the product of human skill, as mediation between human desire and nature’s entropy, and as collection of beautiful, selected stones that could be found only in nature, by chance. aurèce vettier’s GAN-generated works and opus sectile make in practice a peaceful collaboration between humans and nature and the results, in both cases, are beautiful and thought provoking.