Clement Valla


Xpo gallery is pleased to announce the first solo show by Clement Valla in Europe to open 16th of April in Paris Xpo Gallery 

There's an exhibition that attempts a reconstruction of the Great Portal at Cluny, a medieval church in France that rivaled St. Peters in Rome before it was dynamited to bits. The portal looks like a puzzle - small fragments are reassembled in a sparse composition. The whole thing has been composed by capturing 3d models of the dispersed fragments housed in museums across the world. A video narrates the technical challenges and details. It's produced by the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers.

There's a .zip file on a hard drive that contains a mesh (mesh.obj) and a texture (tex_0.jpg). The JPG turns out to be a fantastic puzzle of photographic fragments and shards. The mesh is a 3d model - a series of points joined together that define a form in space. The photorealistic model constituted on-screen is composed of these twin puzzle pieces - abstract, mathematically precise interconnected points in space, and a messy, exploded picture of photographic shards.

There's a url that may or may not be a conspiracy theory site. It clamors about evidence that the Shroud of Turin is real - or fake. It's full of laborious technical details - the depth of the imprint, the chemical nature of the marks, the linen, pollen samples, etc... The site's author has created a piece of software to extract a 3d model from the image on the shroud. The shroud is a technical apparatus - a picture that encodes data points for an object.

There's a director of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers who invents photogrammetry in 1849, a year or so after the invention of photography itself. It is a process that extracts 3-dimensional data from photographs. The process takes a set of images and constructs a data set of points in space.

There's an architectural surveyor who is afraid of heights as the result of a near-death fall from a cathedral. He turns to photogrammetry. It allows him to map and measure from a distance, without touching. In photogrammetry the photos are a data set and not an ends — not the final thing to look at. The single photograph does not produce any data, only the set of interrelated pictures does.






  Clement Valla, Xpo Gallery, Paris
  http://www.xpogallery.com/exhibition/clement-valla/