Michel Paysant: See Monet

Curator: Claire Bernardi, Sophie Eloy
Artist: Michel Paysant

Michel Paysant builds his practice at the intersection of art and science: “Making art interests me, but collaborating with fields that, a priori, have nothing to do with it, different genres, is fascinating,” he explains. From this perspective he developed “DALY” (Dessiner Avec Les Yeux – Drawing with my Eyes), a project using an eye tracker to record visual activity, fixation points and movements, transforming the eye itself into a drawing tool. For more than thirty years, Paysant has collaborated with laboratories and institutions including the Louvre, Centre Pompidou, MUDAM Luxembourg, Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Dadu Museum in Beijing, Nouveau Musée National in Monaco and the Centre d’Art Verrier in Meisenthal.

Paysant revisits art history by “looking at” works through the filter of his own practice. In 2022, he set out to draw Monet’s “Water Lilies” with his eyes, a paradoxical challenge given their scale and decentralised, “all-over” composition. The artist’s eye movements transcribe an “inner cinema”, which he renders in material form: drawings on paper made with a plotter, lights created from fixation points at the moment of viewing Monet’s “Green Reflections”, and polymorphous works where traditional techniques and high technology converge.

Interdisciplinarity lies at the core of his imagination: “The bridges I try to imagine connect art, design, craftsmanship, technique, new technologies and high tech. Neither documentary nor fictional, the aim is to develop an aesthetic of dream, a vision.” Trained at the Royal College of Art in London, he moves freely across nanotechnologies, neurosciences, glassmaking, ceramics and weaving. For Paysant, art must traverse disciplines “without taboo or specialisation”, surprising and expanding our view of the world.

Over the past three decades his work has been presented at major institutions worldwide, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo, MACBA Buenos Aires, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, National Museum Riyadh, and UCCA Beijing.