zancan

"I can't explain why the sight of a clump of grass growing bravely through the crack of a concrete wall gives me such joy. Or why watching my lawn explode in the spring into a chaotic throng of wild plant species demonstrating their determination to live fascinates me so much. There is something of the order of the unconscious, or of the collective consciousness, which attaches man to nature to the point of affecting his senses in a primal way, whereas I am like many an urban product of modernity and technology.

In my works, nature is not the main subject, but it is a means of depicting, among other things, the vital force, the resilience of the living. There is in its multiplicity and its autonomous, chaotic and organized aspect something that traditional painting did not allow me to capture, other than thanks to infinite labor and a gesture that was far too controlled. Algorithmic art opened up this possibility for me to render nature, in its movement, its density, its wild abundance."

Zancan, generative artist from Bordeaux, France, has been both a painter and a programmer for four decades. By synergizing his former practice as a traditional artist working with oil paint with the computer code medium, he enlightened the graphical possibilities of a « figurative-generative » art genre. His digital artworks and resulting pen-plotter drawings, which rely on technology both to exist and to be traded, are his inspiration to remind us of the necessary bond between man and nature, raising attention through visual symbolism about environmental and social matters.

Zancan's series "Garden, Monoliths" and "The Lushtemples", that focus on rendering natural shapes with mathematical equations and programming code, have become the top-selling collections on the blockchain Tezos.