Raphaël Faon 

Pictorial Protection – Sewing Template

France

“Pictorial Protection is an online digital artwork. It was carried out during the quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic. The interface allows you to generate masks and save them for printing on home computers. The pattern allows everyone to easily make a paper mask. Each time the page is loaded, a new mask is generated from online stock images. The program runs in three languages (English, French, Spanish). As an online project, this piece can be shown in a digital exhibition during quarantine; after the crisis, it can be exhibited on a computer connected to a printer in an art space.

This artistic proposal questions the shortage of protective masks and the digital circulation of images during quarantine. It's an invitation to bring landscapes images from digital databases out of the screen. The mask becomes a paradoxical window on the outside and the pattern shape allows to see those pictures in a different way.”

Raphaël Faon works and lives in Paris. He trives to disturb systems of representation. His work reveals the way in which reality is constructed in a world of images and shows how the opacity and complexity of images contradict their apparent transparency. Deconstructing frameworks of vision, he infiltrates the archives of the contemporary world in order to interrogate them and to lend them new meaning by exploring their political ambiguity. In all of his experimental projects, the artist emphasizes transitions and translations from one medium to another, highlighting themes of long-distance communication, the digital imagination, and new technologies, which he examines via photography, installations, and digital techniques.

For more information about the artist, check out: www.raphaelfaon.com