7.1 BY OBVIOUS

Danysz Paris-Marais is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Obvious, the French collective of artists and researchers behind the major auction sale of the first work of art using artificial intelligence by the renowned Christie's in 2018. The creatives who have marked an eminent turning point in the history of art market and who were named in 2020 among the "30 Under 30" by Forbes, which described them as "geniuses", dive us into the world of GANism, unveiling their brand new series composed of oil paintings on canvas along with NFT artworks.

 

Dedicated to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, this new series by Obvious, first exclusively revealed at the British Museum on November 23, 2022, is the result of a long research work that led them to collaborate with historians in order to seek out and identify any references to the Seven Wonders in historical texts written by geographers, historians and writers. Today, it is a contemporary journey to the heart of the Ancient World that the young creatives are offering us.

 

Who has never heard of the Seven Wonders of the World? Even today, the mere mention of them is sufficient to arouse the imagination and bring back distant memories. And yet, few people manage to list them all or to describe them accurately. For good reason: even if their existence is attested by numerous testimonies and descriptions, their aspect remains a subject of debate. With the exception of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, none of them has survived the passing of time.

 

And this is not the least of the paradoxes: considered as the most extraordinary architectural achievements of the ancient world, these wonders continue to haunt our collective unconscious even though our level of knowledge is only partial and approximate. We are familiar with them without really knowing them. This is precisely what makes them all the more fascinating and a fertile ground that has fostered the imagination of many artists and illustrators.

 

Through “7.1 by Obvious” Danysz gallery invites us to discover the work by the French collective, which is the result of their many conversations with algorithms, a work of iteration, selection and production in an effort to reinterpret a classic subject in art history. The works arising from this creative process find themselves at the crossroads of science, history and art.

 

After having revisited Japanese prints, African masks and classical portraits with their well-known series "The family of Belamy” in their previous works, Obvious have decided to use traditional oil on canvas for their new series, a technique that gives them the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with the classical artists who preceded them in the treatment of this theme, while also preserving certain visual incongruities resulting from their exploration of the man-machine creation language.

  

Where their predecessors used brushes, charcoal, hammers or chisels, Obvious shapes their works using computer tools that they adapt to their research object. Their work thus develops in a dialogue with algorithms before ultimately leading to plastic creations. A change of era and tools. But also, a change of language.

 

Obvious explores this emerging universal language in a recurring dialogue with the machine through the creation of multiple scripts to generate images and guide the process in the chosen direction. Each of their works is therefore the outcome of a process of back and forth and interaction with algorithms whose generative capacities result from complex numerical calculations. There is no self-conscious creativity here, despite what the term "artificial intelligence" might suggest. The author is not the artificial intelligence but definitely the trio of artists who use it as a tool at the service of their creative process