Joanie Lemercier
Joanie Lemercier (b. 1982) draws with light. He got started at age five, in his mother's classes on pattern design for fabrics, and went on to co-found the projection collective AntiVJ and spend two decades making light itself the material — projected onto buildings, gallery walls, water mist, and mountains. I first found his work through the 3D imagery he conjured by projecting onto curtains of water, and we met at the Eyeo Festival back in the day; he and curator Juliette Bibasse, his partner in Joanie Lemercier Studio in Brussels, are two of the most interesting artists I follow. Since those days he's taken up the pen plotter and folded all of it into his environmentalism: the studio tracks and publishes its carbon footprint, he's lent his projectors to Extinction Rebellion, he shows up at Autodesk conferences to point out that their mining and extraction software underwrites the destruction of the earth — to the point that Autodesk admits it has a "Joanie Problem" — and his last visit to the United States, in 2026, came by sailing vessel to avoid the carbon of flying. My corner of his practice is the drawings, where machines and ink stand in for projectors. In the spring of 2021 he sold drawings on hic et nunc that didn't exist yet, each plotted only once it had a collector, to prove digital art could live on a low-energy blockchain — I bought one, and the NFT came along with the drawing: a square of contour lines we call the ocean drawing, later joined by the A1-sized A Possible Landscape 14, three Point Cloud drawings, and a quartet of Nuages Possibles. His video installation Slow Violence, on coal mining's erasure of one of Europe's oldest forests, anchored "Paisajes de luz" at Espacio Fundación Telefónica in Madrid in 2021, his largest solo show to date.
Artist's website (joanielemercier.com) ↗
6 physical works · 3 digital projects (9 iterations)
