savoir-rêve
When landscapes appear in aurèce vettier’s work, they take the form of spaces held at a distance, whose atmosphere retains a particular density and opacity. The image is structured around partially indeterminate zones, restrained depths, and incomplete visibility. This aesthetic corresponds to the way memories reconfigure themselves through dream activity, oscillating between fragmentary precision and active gaps. It gives rise to a notion of dream-knowledge: a form of knowledge shaped through contact with unstable images, one that accepts incompleteness as a condition of perception.
The technologies and techniques employed by the artist are integral to this construction. aurèce vettier trains generative artificial intelligence models on images connected to childhood, embracing the fact that the algorithm introduces new continuities where the archive itself remains discontinuous. The process generates a plurality of propositions, after which a work of selection, refinement, and stabilization leads to the final piece. The artist often chooses to incorporate his prompts, sometimes deliberately minimal, into the titles of the works. Making these textual instructions visible foregrounds the linguistic dimension of the protocol and clarifies its intention.
The generated images are then translated into painting by a decorative painter. His role belongs to a workshop-based tradition of craftsmanship, comparable to that of an Aubusson weaver or an artisan working in pietra dura: the aim is to reproduce the supplied images as faithfully as possible. This translation is based on a close, continuous, and intensive exchange with aurèce vettier, involving repeated back-and-forth and successive adjustments until the work converges towards an exact form. The process situates the project within a historical continuity in which the circulation of images, procedures of reproduction, collaboration, and technical mastery are constitutive parameters of artistic production.
This first body of work, belonging to the realm of sur-réalité, is directly connected to a second field of investigation: nature, understood both as a reservoir of forms and as a space of projection. aurèce vettier constructs his own datasets by gathering visual elements from diverse sources in order to create a potential herbarium within latent space. This approach allows him to establish an autonomous formal frame of reference while limiting dependence on the conventions and biases of off-the-shelf tools. These fragments of augmented nature materialize in oil on canvas, Aubusson tapestry, and bronze. The bronze works notably employ the technique known as lost wood casting, whose purpose is to produce objects that are unique by design. Within these works, levels of detail derived from observation coexist with areas of computational approximation, and it is precisely this coexistence that generates part of their perceptual strangeness.
aurèce vettier’s practice thus unfolds through an oscillation between sur-réalité and sur-nature. It brings together memory and invention, archive and projection, computation and workshop practice, proposing a visual experience in which the living world and the dream echo one another. Nature becomes simultaneously source, method, and horizon, while the dream becomes a situated form of knowledge.