Carrés magiques de traits lumineux is a collaborative project between Joanie Lemercier and Vera Molnár based on the geometric compositions produced by the latter as a tribute to one of the most enigmatic and best-known engravings of Albrecht Dürer: Melancolia I (1514). The numerous symbolic elements in the work include a magic square, where the horizontal, vertical and diagonal numbers it contains always add up to 34. Ever since her youth, Molnár has regularly pondered this mysterious object with its imaginary machine, a method for generating compositions following a set of predetermined rules and including the accidents that result from it. Molnár already used computers in 1968 to programme infinite variations of geometric shapes and lines. Algorithms help her to preview her ideas. The machine at the service of artistic freedom. Using these compositions inspired by the magic square, Joanie Lemercier creates light and movement, animating new variables that help generate almost infinite results from the possibilities initiated by Molnár. 

Piece created for LlumBCN 2023
Concept and generative code: Joanie Lemercier
Artistic concept : Joanie Lemercier and Vera Molnár
With the support of: Vincent Baby
Artistic direction Studio Joanie Lemercier: Juliette Bibasse
Production: Nicolas Roziecki
Technical development: Martin Pirson

Joanie Lemercier

Is a French visual artist and environmental activist. His work explores human perceptions through the manipulation of light in space. Working primarily with light projection and computer programming, he transforms the appearance of everyday objects and forms, bending reality to his imagination.  In recent years, Lemercier has become increasingly concerned with climate change and environmental degradation, lending his projection skills and artistry to activist causes and groups such as Extinction Rebellion, as well as developing a new work, Slow Violence, which analyses the devastating effects of coal mining on one of Europe's oldest forests. He has been working with projected light since 2006 and co-founded the acclaimed visual label AntiVJ in 2008. Represented by a New York based gallery since 2010, he founded his own creative studio in Brussels in 2013, whose artistic direction was taken on by Juliette Bibasse.

Vera Molnár

Born in 1924, is a French multimedia artist of Hungarian origin. She is regarded as a pioneer in the art of computing and algorithms. The goal for her art is not simply to create a number of images, but also series with their own meaning. Her works are created from very simple geometric shapes. Her predilection for the formal rigidity and harmony of geometry comes from an admiration for harder forms of science. Co-founder of the group Art et Informatique / Institut d’Esthétique et des Sciences de l’Art (1967), in 1968 she created her first works using a computer and since then a significant number of her works have been produced through the same process. In her famous series “Homage to the Square”, which she began at the start of the 1950s, she uses the calculation of ever smaller shapes to illustrate the theory that changes in location, shape and light produce changes in colour.