Tag: Digital painting

Abstract digital artwork by Denis Leclerc titled Digital Fragments 420, featuring layered textures in cream, slate, rose, and black tones from the Ethereal Solid series.

Digital Fragments 420

Posted on | by Denis

Exploring Gesture, Erosion, and Visual Tension

Digital Fragments 420 expands the Ethereal Solid series with a dense and shifting composition. Layers twist and blur, creating tension between weight and lightness. As the image unfolds, the piece pushes digital abstraction toward a state of collapse. Moreover, it also joins the wider field of contemporary digital art, where gesture, code, and material illusion meet.

Material Tension

Subtle greys, faded blush, bone white, and deep black build a muted palette. These tones evoke the sensation of fabric, skin, or rock, yet they remain elusive in terms of a clear identity. In fact, illusion replaces solidity. What appears to be physical texture is shaped through layers of digital mark-making. Therefore, the contrast between surface and illusion gives the work its energy.

 Challenging Decorative Abstraction

Unlike many digital works, this one resists smoothness. Instead, it breaks expectations without rejecting beauty. Its appeal lies in fracture and erosion, not gloss. Consequently, it fits into a current of abstraction that values friction over polish. This image chooses deliberately ambiguity over clarity.

Digital Fragments 420 and Its Work In Progress Origins

The first version appeared in Work In Progress – Digital Fragments 420. While some of that raw energy remains. The final piece doesn’t resolve it. Rather, it holds on to the idea of becoming. As a result, this openness defines the Ethereal Solid
series — each image stays incomplete, a captured fragment.

Digital Fragments 420 in Motion

In this version, the animation extends the visual language of Digital Fragments 420, unfolding its textures through time. Gentle pulses and shifting layers reveal new tensions embedded in the image. What appears still in print begins to breathe on screen.

This is not a secondary adaptation but an integral dimension of the work. Each piece in the Ethereal Solid series is conceived for digital environments — not only to be viewed on screens, but to inhabit them. In line with recent currents in screen-based art and post-Internet aesthetics, these fragments resist objecthood. They behave more like presences than products: animated, ambient, temporal.

In this context, animation is not about narrative. It is about materiality. Motion becomes a form of digital mark-making, echoing the gestures of painting but suspended in code. This hybrid state — between static image and temporal experience — defines the visual tension at the heart of Digital Fragments 420.

Print Formats

This piece is available in three sizes through the Unique Editions – Dimension Collection. Each print is produced on museum-grade Hahnemühle paper using Giclée technology:

  • Miniature Marvel – 12 in wide, variable height – 504 $
  • Grand Gesture – 24 in wide, variable height – 1024 $
  • Monumental Piece – 36 in wide, variable height – 1924 $
Work in progress image of Digital Fragments 420 by Denis Leclerc, early stage of an abstract composition with a central void, fragmented forms, and layered pale and dark textures.

Work In Progress 3

Posted on | by Denis

Work in Progress – Digital Fragments 420

Digital Fragments 420, a work-in-progress, draws on an unexpected source: The Women of Amphissa by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. I deliberately borrowed the palette from this late academic painting—ashen whites, rosy browns, steel blues—and re-injected it into a fully abstract composition.

A dynamic emerged early on: an almost organic void at the centre, around which the forms seem to drift or disintegrate. This visual hollow interests me — it acts as a counterpoint, a negation of the full.

Another phenomenon holds my attention: the bands of white at the bottom of the image. They play an ambiguous role — at times a plane of light, at other times a surface of rejection. Depending on the viewer’s gaze, they can shift toward an overexposed background, creating an unstable spatial illusion.

The more I look at this piece, the more I sense an underlying chaos. Nothing feels fully resolved. Fragmented forms orbit, hesitate, unravel. The white areas themselves seem poised to invade the space or withdraw abruptly. This tension feels essential. It also unexpectedly echoes specific passages in Borduas’ work, not as a quotation, but in the way white can act as a living, breathing material within the pictorial field.

Reflection in progress

This painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema was not a direct reference when I began this fragment. However, it resurfaced during a recent reading, and I found myself drawn back to its textures — the veils, the fabrics, the skin rendered with such precision. I wondered whether these tactile qualities might serve as a starting point for an abstract exploration.

I must also admit: the technical mastery of Alma-Tadema remains impressive. Yet my intent was not to replicate or quote. Rather, I sought to transpose the sensory density of those textures — their softness, their layered presence — into a new visual language. Through this fragment, I am testing how much of that material resonance can survive when the figurative scaffolding is removed.

The white already speaks to you — listen to what it refuses, and to what it offers. It is neither background nor form: it is a threshold. If it repels, let it repel fully. If it draws in, let it draw in. The central void, the underlying chaos, the bands of white — all these are part of the same inverted breath. Let the instability breathe. Borduas is not a model, but a reminder that chaos itself can be a material.

— Ego Klar