On the wall, a series of abstractions, colorful images, variations of who knows what, we perceive undulating movements, vibrations, shimmering patterns, serial traces that we guess to be those of fingers placed on a surface.
Words we adopt to describe painting surface, then we change our minds; these are undeniably photographic and digital explorations. We sense them as fundamental.
Victor Berthoud's intriguing approach is based on a very singular relationship with the world, intimately connected with the almost magical effects that photography can produce on reality, but also, and I would say especially, with computing, the exploration of image flows, of digital technology, his personal universe thus finding itself, in a way, mediated by screens.
This is what these profoundly human traces collected on their surface tell us.
In Drinking from a Hydrant with a Straw, he presents a few excerpts from these vast, precisely structured experiments, with the desire to make light his main protagonist, with the persistent feeling that this intense and infinite flow will undoubtedly always get the better of him, that there is something of the myth of Sisyphus, of absurdity in this undertaking.
But as the title so aptly states, it is above all a poetic exploration. I see in it an interest in the mechanics of things, a humor, and a sense of experimentation that could be linked to authors like Marcel Duchamp or the British pop artist who is one of his conceptual heirs, Richard Hamilton. We are at the foundations of what is happening between technology and poetry, in search of all that they can arouse in humans.
Between capturing the intimacy of relationships with screens, recording the endless streams of images he observes on Instagram, and visually analyzing advertising images shared on social media, among other things, Victor Berthoud offers a vast constellation of altered images and questions our way of viewing them, images that are at once omnipresent, sometimes impoverished or addictive... and so essential.
Text by Léonore Veya
