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“A useless machine that does not represent anything is the perfect device through which we can easily revive our imagination, afflicted daily by useful machines.”
From Gutenberg to Big Data
While the passage of time seems to accelerate every day, Fred Penelle and Yannick Jacquet offer a pause, a suspension, a breath. A strange mechanism stretches across the wall, populated with shadowy chimeras. They are mysterious and yet somehow familiar. Is this a laboratory experiment or the plan for a future network? Minutely constructed like a fine clock, it traces connections, routes, genuinely-false, looping itineraries, inviting escape, inviting dreams. The narrative is deconstructed like a thousand-storied film script. Every effort is made to lead astray, to turn around, to forge ahead. Time is shredded, decomposed, lost and yet everything references it.Mécaniques Discursives is like a parenthesis between two epochs: Gutenberg's and Big Data's. By contrasting the oldest form of image reproduction (woodcutting) with the most recent digital technologies, the installation straddles centuries and contracts time.
intro
intro
“Like the crazy instruction manual for an improbable world factory, like a hybrid and timeless mythology, Frédéric Penelle’s ferocious woodcuts dialogue with the sharp video art created by Yannick Jacquet - or perhaps it’s the other way around - to recount, carefully and amusingly, the incontrovertible evidence of the meaninglessness of the world, the origin of the unknowable precedence of the chicken and the egg, of scientists and their machines, of your brain and its hallucinations. This implacably absurd demonstration hiccups and smiles, above all, at our own inundations and uncontrolled fumigations, at our own mechanical vanities.”
biography
biography
Fred Penelle (1976 - 2020)
Fred Penelle (1976–2020) developed a body of work built on accumulation, reuse, and transformation. Working from a growing archive of woodcut matrices, he continuously recomposed images, assembling fragments into dense, unstable constellations.
His installations unfold across walls and space, combining printed engravings with objects, cardboard, or metal structures. Figures emerge, collide, and hybridise, forming a shifting visual language where references archival imagery, contemporary popular culture, and elements drawn from his own evolving mythology.intertwine without hierarchy.
Rather than producing fixed compositions, his work operates as a system in motion. Images are never final, they circulate, mutate, and reappear in new configurations. This constant reactivation creates narratives that resist linear reading, oscillating between absurdity and tension.
At the core of his practice lies a friction between manual processes and the logic of proliferation. Through repetition and displacement, his work reflects a world saturated with images, where meaning is continuously constructed and destabilised.
From 2011 onwards, his collaboration with Yannick Jacquet on Mécaniques Discursives extended this approach into spatial and temporal dimensions.
Fred Penelle passed away in 2020. His artistic vocabulary continues to inspire the imaginations of its loyal interpreters.
Yannick Jacquet (1980)
Yannick Jacquet, a French-Swiss artist born in Geneva in 1980, has been living and working in Brussels since 2005. With a background in videography, scenography, and visual art, Jacquet's work explores the intersection of digital technologies and non-artificial intelligences. With a focus on sensory experience and human connection, his art often incorporates elements of intimacy and contemplation.
His work has been exhibited as part of contemporary art events in museums and galleries around the world (Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Moscow, Tokyo, Montreal, Cairo,Taiwan…)
In the early 2000s, Jacquet was excited by the potential of networked technologies and believed in their utopian promise of free exchange and global connectivity. However, as personal data has become commodified and we have entered an into an attention economy, Jacquet has shifted his focus to creating temporary spaces of deconditioning where attention can be cultivated and valued.
Jacquet's work is often influenced by a discourse on the end of times. He is committed to exploring new paradigms, such as slowness, as a means of restoring sensitivity in our lives.
In addition to his personal artistic practice, Jacquet regularly collaborates with other artists for live performances, digital and contemporary art festivals and events.
In 2007, Jacquet co-founded the international visual label Antivj, which has played a significant role in the rise of digital and media art in the early 21st century.
In 2011, he created Mécaniques Discursives with the engraver Fred Penelle.
