Like a genetic designer, Philippe Le Miere has created a cyber reality, where androids designed from anatomical studies perform the natural patterns of human evolution. These vivacious and strangely erotic “mindscapes”, Opening Landscape, The Struggle, The Birth, Reproduction, Death and Re-birth, appear as film stills placed somewhere between Ridley Scott’s ‘Human Replicants’ in Blade Runner, Wachowski’s virtual reality in The Matrix and Charlie Kaufman’s concept of entering the portal world in Being John Malkovich.
These heavenly stages are meticulously constructed via pixilation, rather than pigments, creating a harmonious meeting between the simulations of natural science, with the art of technology. “Painting with a pixel,” says Le Miere. “Is like painting with a pigment”.
Le Miere’s constructed realities unintentionally provoke enquiries surrounding the nature of “artificial” life forms and the nature of the “natural” world. In some ways, Le Miere has created an alternate world, where human imitations breed and mimic the perilous cycle of human existence. “The artist in some ways is there to hold up the mirror, being detached from the everyday and becoming somewhat foreign,”he says.
Embedded with a mystical sense of imagery, mythology, and symbolism, Le Miere’s obvious translation of classical Baroque and Renaissance compositions captivate a similar motif of 16th century works, yet these images have no direct reference to a particular place, rather they appear more about a psychological space and as only belonging to Le Miere’s imagination. The range of historical and contemporary influences, both in technique and in content, found in Le Miere’s worlds, provoke new ways of seeing and cultivating a human nature.
Similar to the ideas behind Locke’s Tabula Rasa, thefigures depicted in these works appear to have no historical lineage and are void of a human culture. Perhaps these illusionary otherworlds are self-portraits of Le Miere’s collective unconscious, as though there is a world within the world, oscillating between a dream and a physiological experience.
Each scene fundamentally imprisons the biological stages in a human life. The synthetic colour palette is the only operative guide to human sensation and emotion. It is as though a life stripped of memory and concepts will remain victim to these banal primal biological associations.
By creating a new world to perform these primal stages, Le Miere provokes his audience to re-question the very essence of what it means to be human. “Like an anthropologist,” says Le Miere. “Discovering a primitive tribe for the first time, we can discover for ourselves a new world through these images.”
The beguiling beauty of Le Miere’s Opening Landscape, where a seagull flies over an artificial verdant cliff in the open seascape, allows transcendence to a land of where dreams live. The mysterious eroding greenery and translucent water acts somewhat like a toxic repellent, highlighting the notion of forbidden territory. It is a world which cannot be entered on foot.
The work The Struggle, reminiscent of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve,is indicative of human vulnerability and the sublime. The blackened night sky creates an amorphous and barren landscape. Based on the story of Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia’s battle, where Tarquinius threatens Lucretia unless she welcomes his sexual advances, Le Miere’s characters appear to be re-telling Titan’s story of human conflict and sexual desire. Both victims in this work however stand naked and appear defenceless.
The enchanting and unintentionally comical image, The Birth depicts a babybeing born from a tree. Two trees stand overlapped and entwined and one of them, more feminine in stature, breeds new life to a kneeling woman. Based on The Birth of Adonis, this work could well be figurative of our growing symbiosis with technology in the same way as nature. “The computer has been a very natural medium for me for over six years,” remarks Le Miere. “I don’t find it artificial; there is something real about it.”
Technology has undoubtedly become our second nature, in the same way this very notion further provokes the perpetual enquiry to unravel the inner workings of the mind, the unconscious and human behaviour to define the term “human”. In a world of genetic engineered human imitations, Le Miere asks what will remain untampered and fundamentally “human”.
Whether it is a dream, an illusion, or a genetically designed reality, each construct exists disparately to the everyday conscious world. Le Miere has created these mindscapes to illustrate the multiple realties, the worlds within the mind and the external reality that continues to evolve by manifesting a purpose.
Melissa Amore
Melissa Amore is a freelance writer based in Melbourne.
Stich, S Descartes versus Locke: Innate Ideas.
Empiricists such as Locke, John (1632- 1704) hold that the human mind, at the beginning of its existence is like a blank tablet, Tabula Rasa, no ideas, none of the sensible and intelligble forms by virtue of which it perceives, imagines and understands things. Such forms first come into the mind from outside sense perception.