For thirty years, Anne Sarah Le Meur has been creating works with a moving and enigmatic presence that never cease to surprise the eye. After studying mathematics, she discovered computer-generated images at the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Paris 8, where she learned to program and compose images on a computer. “Being a scientist by training,” she says, “the idea of making art with computers seemed impossible to me, but this impossibility was actually an enormous stimulation […].*” In her recent works, a multitude of hues unfold before our eyes: green, gray, deep purple, a pink-orange… sometimes a bright red bursts in. However, the artist uses a very limited “palette”: two or three lights, one clear and colorful, and the other dark. Like the painter who uses only the three primary colors to obtain an extraordinary range of nuances, Anne Sarah Le Meur experiments with very few elements to arrive at an almost infinite number of possibilities and a great visual richness. She develops her images in 3D software, writes her code and defines her variables and loops, without knowing in advance exactly what will happen.
And the computer generates the images as it performs the calculations. Thus, they are constantly transformed. And to make her paintings, the artist must make choices and pauses on the phenomena in perpetual motion. Hence the sensation of undulation and colored pulsation that captures our gaze.
Alongside her computer-generated images, Anne Sarah Le Meur has always practiced photography. She captures enigmatic shapes in everyday objects, in the light that passes through a glass vase, or in the shadows cast on a wall. When traveling, her eye can be drawn to a street scene, to a fragment of architecture. In her photographs, notably the series Sourdre et Lasse from 2011, there is an exploration of light and chiaroscuro, in visual dialogue with her 3D images.
Without canvas or brush, the artist thus develops a work that questions painting. Through the programming process, we are led, well beyond technology, towards the contemplation of the sensory presence of color
[…]Diana Quinby, Artist and art historian
