César Piette: Rendering

Models, compositions, light, depth of field: César Piette reconstructs painterly reality in a modern, gentle manner. His works are concise and vivid; titles briefly list what appears in the image, mainly modest combinations of portraits, animals, plants, and objects. Viewed from a distance, one might take them for computer-generated models: objects have smooth or glossy textures, like plastic or metal, with backgrounds showing pronounced blur, as if shot with a telephoto lens to produce shallow depth of field, contrasting sharply with the subject. Most of Piette’s works rest on a foundation that is bright, dynamic, and endearingly lively.

To achieve this refined painterly style, Piette first models on a computer and airbrushes the main subject onto the canvas, minimizing visible brushwork. In contrast to digital art’s trend toward flatness, Piette’s work possesses a quality of artificial realism. Although viewers can immediately tell the difference between the objects in the painting and their real-world referents, they find themselves lost in the meticulously crafted sheen, texture, and tactile detail. Up close, one can see Piette’s hand-painted scratches, pits, and stains. The artist draws the viewer into a layered labyrinth of the real: each work is an organic fusion of 3D computer modeling, painting, and photography, dissolving rigid boundaries, preserving vivid colors and lively dynamism, while erasing signs of life, leaving only life’s simulacrum.

From Piette’s work, we can return to Baudrillard’s interrogation of the real. In Piette’s paintings, the simulacra of people, animals, and plants do not exist merely as imitations of reality. One might even say they no longer bear any direct connection to their prototypes, but have become a self-contained fictional world.¹ Judging by his titles, Piette seems intent on leaving no trace of human artifice: he names works as if performing image recognition, cataloguing their contents, with no metaphor, artistic embellishment, or excess of language, as though the works do not belong to their creator but exist as independent entities. Gazing at these creations, one senses they have been frozen in these moments by a camera, as if each moment is merely an unremarkable part of their lives. These creations do not lack anthropological detail; they bear the marks of wear left by time. One cannot accuse them of anything, for they are harmless: they carry no strong narrative or emotion, only smooth surfaces.

So in such paintings, or rather, “renderings,” what is present? The painting simulates the render, the render simulates the real, yet the painting simultaneously bypasses the render and traces the real directly. At the same time, the real has not solidified into a single image: the real is confounding itself. From Roland Barthes’s era to Baudrillard’s, the realism and historical utility of photography had already collapsed; and from Baudrillard’s era to the present, digital image and bodily image vie with each other, together constituting the subject’s form within society. The “real” that Piette depicts may be embodied in the texture of his imagery as much as in the imagery itself. The digital image has become an inseparable part of the real.

Some of Piette’s other works possess an entirely different style: their texture is no longer candy-like and cute, instead showing signs of disorder and chaos. The subjects are still the same model-like figures or animals, with the same rendered texture, yet the image is no longer smooth, filled with splashes of ink, distortions, smears, gashes, and even tears. In this exhibition, there are four such works, sharing one feature: round, gleaming, cartoonish eyeballs. The eyes stare directly at the viewer; the eyes pose a question: what makes these models different from the others? Why is their world dirty and blurred, while the world of the others is clear and smooth? They are still within the canvas, yet the canvas itself is turbulent. In these paintings, Piette challenges his own other works: does the world these models inhabit exist in a style that is seemingly harmless, smooth, and endearing, or does it exist as violent, jagged, fractured, eruptive destructive force? He guides viewers to reconsider the seemingly fixed background and structure they inhabit, through a different lens and mode of thinking.

Piette navigates between media and styles with considerable intelligence. He is unsatisfied with clichéd content or conventional value propositions, yet he presents his art in the most concise and accessible way possible: even if all analysis and interpretation were stripped away, his art would still feel comforting, still convey the loveliness and beauty of things. His art is not merely art about itself; it is art about humanity, about the real, about technology.