César Piette: Proxy

Throughout art history, from prehistoric cave paintings to ancient Greek sculptures to
modernism and contemporary expression, art has documented and reflected what it means
to exist, to be a human. A raw human experience of free will, mortality, morality, or meaning
has been the source of art’s emotional and psychological material, elevating it above mere
decoration. But these ideas are undergoing drastic change in the age of virtual hyperreality.
As our online presence increasingly overlaps with our physical being and screens extract our
physical experience into a standardized product, we’re inseparably existing in two realities.
One in which we physically are, and a digital, virtual one in which the highly legible data
double of our consciousness drives our proxy escapades.

In the same way that objects or protagonists entering a canvas picture plane are
transformed into pictorial representations or proxies, one cannot bring one's physical self into
the online world. And by employing his own logic of simplification, flattening, and artificial
perfection, César Piette has been developing a hybrid painting-3D modeling practice that
reflects on this phenomenon. Honoring the legacies of artistic movements alongside the
tendencies of digital technology, his latest body of work is particularly focused on the
intersection of painting and digital manipulation, and on the tension between artificial,
seductive surfaces and the tactile, textured process. Deeply invested in understanding our
evolving relationship with technology, both the anxiety and beauty inherent in
human-machine collaboration, he delivers a sharp critique through the polished, glossy new
works that merge traditional painting and printing techniques. By employing sleek technical
precision alongside handmade physical marks, Piette comments on how we observe and
experience our surroundings and, ultimately, on the reduction of individuality to
administratively and algorithmically trackable units.

The French artist first introduced his ideas in 2017, when he produced works that
revolved around the proxying of an object using 3D modeling software. Mimicking the logic
behind emojis or stock models, a physical, unique object or character was stripped of its
material imperfections, wear, and tactile context, and replaced with a glossy, plasticized,
simplified visual shorthand. Over time, this idea expanded into a broader image-proxy
notion, leading to the incorporation and appropriation of images found online. Undergoing
deliberate reconstruction and systematic duplication, fragmentation, and abstraction, these
anonymous, digitally standardized images are translated into a proxy of a proxy. Built upon a
layered collision of objects that seem to dissolve into a multiplication of shapes, energetic
brushstrokes, collages, and varied effects, these visuals echo early modernist movements
such as Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism, where fragmentation and simultaneity conveyed
the speed, complexity, and disorientation of modern life. For Piette, such an approach
exposes the experiential proxy that represents an emotionally flattened, user-friendly
on-screen presentation designed for rapid consumption. However, although using an
optimized, frictionless aesthetic language, the overexposure and sameness of the
presentation lead to a loss of context and an inability to discern what truly matters.

After recognizing and pointing out the distinct levels at which our old-fashioned
human experience is reprocessed by the digital sphere, Piette does a full 180° back to the
painterly tradition. Since he is not depicting the actual objects but rather their digital
representations, he uses a painterly approach to undermine the very efficiency these proxies
are built to provide. Primarily engineered for speed, automated replication, and instant
legibility, Piette deliberately sabotages the efficiency of stylized airbrush guns, cigarettes,
ballerina shoes, or seagulls by counterbalancing them with a meticulous, time-intensive
traditional painting process. By intentionally incorporating flaws or mistakes and adding
splashes, drips, brushstrokes, and marks, he introduces physical friction, a sense of human
labor, and human error into an aesthetic designed to entirely deny them. By taking the proxy
imagery collected by his virtual persona from the emotionally flat cyber reality, Piette
subverts their commercial intent, turning the commodified digital objects into artistic
expressions. With that, these works serve as a critique or warning about how the digital
sphere reprocesses daily life and its own products within a self-referential ecosystem. Just
as early Modernists fractured forms to capture the analytical precision of the machine age,
Piette uses painterly disruption to navigate our own tech-generated reality. Ultimately,
proxying a proxy creates a hyperreal feedback loop in which the genuine self is at risk of
being lost, while meaning is endlessly constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed.

- Saša Bogojev