To create his Pixel project, Victor Boullet has gleaned a collection of photographs of well-known historical and contemporary characters from the internet over a period of years and reduced them down to a single pixel. He has stripped this imagery down to its fundamental elements, capturing the subject’s intrinsic qualities rather than actually depicting them.
The Pixel project comprises 100 different single pixels, each enlarged to an 80cm x 80cm square and each a different colour.
The only clue as to the origins of the image is in the title, Ingmar Bergman, Peter Sellers, Edvard Munch, Ronald Regan etc. The colour and tone of each piece also, to a degree, evokes the person in the portrait, it creates an aura to be drawn on in the recognition process.
The selection of the 100 personalities was both random and deliberate at the same time.
The initial collection of images was a indiscriminate, yet Boullet found the resulting group of people were based on his own cultural references; film, art, British television, European culture, international music, world history. He does not entirely remove the subject’s features, but provides only a tiny proportion of the original image. His view is that the public are fed vast quantities of information on a daily basis and are rarely left the space to contemplate the huge amounts of visual images that surround us in order to draw their own subjective conclusions.
When looking through this myriad of personalities, we are affected by our knowledge of each of them. Michael Jackson; on stage, black trilby, silver socks or conversely big sunglasses and black face mask. Elizabeth Taylor; in costume as Cleopatra, or overweight, voluminous gown and big jewellery. As we encounter each piece, we automatically conjure up our own image of the subject according to our own perception. Feelings such as pity, humour, admiration, fear are evoked according to this personal reference.
