DE NOVEMBRE À DÉCEMBRE 2009.
David Gumbs is born in Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe in 1977. He was brought up on the island of Sint-Martin. As a Multimedia artist, painter, photographer, and experimental video artist, his work challenges the cycle of life, the nature within, and digital rhizome graphical macroscopic universes.
He Majored in Interactive Multimedia conception at “Les Ateliers L’ENSCI” of Paris in 2002. He has taught Multimedia, Transmedia and Motion design in the visual arts school in Martinique since 2009. And has been invited to give digital design and Interactive video Master Classes in Europe and in the Caribbean (Jacmel Haiti in 2013, Orleans’s and Besancon’s visual art schools from 2005 to 2006). His work has been selected for major exhibits and Biennials both in Europe and in the Caribbean.
"My artistic approach is based on a famous quotation from Xvii th century French philosopher and chemist antoine Lavoisier : « Mass is neither gained nor lost, merely transformed ». Thus, life’s cycle, infinite scale, memory, and the Sacred, are themes that emerge from larger topics of interest such as landscape, inner landscape, body landscape, field of vision, and off frame. Concepts close to Chris Marker’s « in Memo- ry », Ernest Pignon Ernest’s « arborigènes », Desiree Dolron « Sacred Conversation » and Karl Blossfeldt life’s work.
But what primary impulsion, what necessity, drives me to express such diverse, hybrid creative universes ? Both the vital need of random drawing, painting, interactive video art, computer generative art, and the process of creative accidents, nourish my research. The shape revealing random gesture in my drawings and paintings is a reflection of a wandering quest. Where are questioned : phenomenology of percep- tion through the visible and the invisible, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm, and the genesis. These points of interests compelled me to leave the French West indies around 2001. Where i searched for signs of the « unseen » shown for example by ho- minoid trees, or by clouds with figurative shapes and In-situ surreal like automatic drawing. From Paris, Cuba, Japan my wandering process is sometimes expressed by macro photography stills of life (see « Macrotidien » series), aging walls, faces of time and more.
My painting and drawing universes are shaped from thousand of interlaced lines. Often born from the center of the art board they grow in a circular process, just like life’s growth. These immersed spaces reveal personal mental projections from the unconscious. This process is the result of an automatic drawing act. Which is sometimes the witness of a runoff discharge. The interlaced texture created with and without colour, plays an interactive rhizome plot of each visitor’s unconsciousness."
