A major figure in the French digital art and avant-garde film scenes since the late 1990s, Jacques Perconte (born 1974, lives and works in Paris) considers himself a visual artist. He concentrates on the landscape, utilizing a variety of forms including linear film for cinema and generative film for exhibition/gallery, audiovisual performance, photography and installation. His primary focus is to examine our ongoing cultural and technical relationships with nature.

"Discovering the work of Jacques Perconte is traveling in a country with magical landscapes where time expands. The colors gush from all sides. The image becomes a pictorial material to transform the cinema screen into a true painting."

His surprising formal universalism, which references the history of painting and its command of nature as subject, was borne from the relationship between the delicate rhythm and apparent softness of the natural world in contrast with the extreme technicality of digital images in the computational world. Through reverse engineering and expert manipulation of the encoding and storage technologies of digital video, Jacques Perconte crafts magical landscapes as colorful fairytales whose critical and popular success is growing.

Perconte’s exhibition venues include both cinematic theaters and contemporary exhibition spaces. His major solo exhibitions include annual shows at Galerie Charlot in Paris, as well as recent exhibitions at Prieuré Saint-Pierre to Pont-Saint-Esprit and the College des Bernardins of Paris. In 2013, the Côté Courts festival featured a significant focus on Perconte’s filmography, showing 26 films over many days. The exclusive and secret club of David Lynch—the Silencio in Paris—screened ten of his films in April 2014. The French Cinematheque, France’s most prestiguous venue for cinema, gave Perconte carte blanche to present his avant-garde program “Suns” in 2014-15. Later in 2015 the Mostra Invideo in Milan focused its 25th edition exclusively on his work.

Perconte also collaborates, including a number of joint works with Jean-Benoît Dunckel. Additional important collaborators have included Leos Carax, Jeff Mills, Hélène Breschand, Eric-Maria Couturier, Julie Rousse, Michel Herreria, Didier Arnaudet Marc Em, Hugo Verlinde, Jean-Jacques Birge, Vincent Segal, Antonin-Tri Huang, and Eddie Ladoire.

Coming from the generation which experienced the birth of the internet, networks have always held an important place in Perconte’s practice. However, while previously a subject in his work, today the network serves primarily to disseminate his unusually vast œuvre. On his website, Perconte offers not only finished works, but many texts, experiments, raw materials, and even theories of his work by others such as Nicole Brenez and Bidhan Jacobs.

"As nothing of the machine is foreign to him, he provokes, pushes to its limits, thinks from its shortcomings and creates according to its mistakes. [...] Aesthetic anchor Jacques Perconte claims the powers of printing, the sense both phenomenological and pictorial." —Nicole Brenez, film theorist and historian responsible for the conservation of avant-garde cinema at the French Cinémathèque