The exhibition

Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alféri called the first volume of their Revue de Littérature Générale (1993-95), Mécanique Lyrique. In so doing, they drew on the avant-gardes, which combined the visual arts with writing, and their fascination with technology. Surrealists, futurists, experimental filmmakers and American Beatnik poets like William Burroughs, each in their own way, dreamed of technological hybridizations. Henri Michaux expressed this relationship in graphic form: he imagined a "cinematic drawing", which would feel the pulse of the day... He stuck to mescaline, a psychedelic substance, as a chemical technology of passage between the psyche and the sheet - and this is how the present exhibition begins, with his drawing.

Would Michaux have marveled at today's generative technologies, or, like the artists presented here, would he have associated the ancient stylus with the digital pencil? From its origins, which are certainly mythical, drawing has been mechanical, doubling the world, but taking from it a little of its soul: a potter's daughter draws the outline of her lover's shadow on a wall, and Pliny the Elder sees in this the origin of art at the beginning of our era. Drawing was thus "found", at once a gesture of abstraction and a techno-thought.

Like the young woman, contemporary artists are reinventing drawing using new technologies. From the very beginnings of bitmap graphics software to vector drawing, they have perceived the lyrical potential of these generated, programmed and animated lines - but also of their failures. This to-and-fro between the material and the virtual, contact and distance, writing and code, makes drawing exist between the virtual presence of the shadow and the animated absence of the image.