About the artist


Always passionate about everything that is organized around a center and the symmetries that result from it, Denis Rodella at 57 years old has mastered his art.

Now living in Burgundy, his chosen land on his mother's side (his mother having been born in Semur-en-Auxois), he devotes himself to his art full time in a small town on the outskirts of Morvan.

It was during a trip to Italy that can be considered "initiatory", the summer of his eighteenth year, that he had the revelation of his artistic sensitivity. So much art, both pictorial and architectural, not to mention the sculptures that are everywhere, in buildings, on facades or squares, without forgetting the fountains, was an upheaval for him.

Since that day, the self-taught man that he is has never stopped cultivating his art. Passionate about History in general and the History of Art in particular, he never wanted to stop at one style, but rather try all the trends through his concept of fractals. After years of producing classic paintings based on paint and collages, the transition to digital gave an unprecedented boost to his long-matured art, making more than three hundred digital paintings in one year. With his vast aesthetic culture, technology made him move up a level through its ease of integrating the most classic painting techniques.

   

But if culture has always been vital to him since this famous journey, his sensitivity to nature has always seemed essential to him too, in order to nourish his soul and cultivate his art.

Like Ernst Haeckel, disciple and friend of Darwin and creator of the concept of ecology, Denis Rodella always had the intuition that art and biology were intimately linked.




At the dawn of his twenty-fifth birthday, a simple stone thrown into the water triggered an artistic revelation in Denis Rodella. The concentric circles formed on the surface and which would expand to infinity, acted as a revealer.

“What if the center was everywhere and the circumference was nowhere?”

From that day on, this intuition made him take up the brush and his passion for painting took the form of circular figures.


Returning to Haeckel, taking advantage of the development of the microscope, he was the first to study jellyfish, radiolarians and many micro-organisms.
As much an artist as a scientist, he set out to represent what he saw, illustrating the impressive beauty of the biological world.
"I shall never forget the delight that seized me when I first observed the first Tiara and the first Irene, the first Chrysaora and the first Cyanea, and attempted to reproduce their sublime forms and colours with my twenty-year-old student's brush."
Having the ability to draw with his right eye while keeping his left eye on the microscope lens, he had the ability to transcribe into images and in record time what he observed.


"One of these books, Artistic Forms of Nature, appeared in 1904, enjoyed particular fame and had an impact on both the scientific and artistic worlds of the time.
Max Schultze, a renowned anatomist, wrote about this book: "The most beautiful scientific work connected with art that exists on the lower animals... and he did not know what to admire more: nature which created such diversity and beauty of forms or the hand of the designer who knew how to transpose these wonders on paper."




Denis Rodella's exploration of natural symmetries, through his inspiration, thus renews the aesthetic experience by offering a perspective that seems to transcend the radical deconstruction of modern art. Which means that he escapes both the chaotic and the anecdotal, the two pitfalls of contemporary aesthetics.

   

These shapes, directly inspired by nature, find new life in his digital creations, evoking a modern aesthetic while preserving a timeless charm. This is due to a subtle connection between human creativity and natural patterns.
This visual celebration of symmetry offers a unique aesthetic experience, inviting viewers to explore the beauty hidden in the recurring patterns that shape our reality.


Otherwise, we cannot understand Denis Rodella's work without mentioning Carl-Gustav Jung. He is the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, once a great friend of Freud, creator of the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes and the process of individuation, who supported the author in his artistic approach.





About thirty years ago, while reading his autobiography My Life , Rodella discovered that Jung too had spontaneously begun to draw circular figures. It was like a revelation to him when he learned that every morning, Jung, then in the midst of a spiritual crisis, also drew what he called mandalas.
“As I have said, the mandala means ‘circle.’ There are innumerable variations of this pattern, but they are all based on the squaring of the circle. Their fundamental pattern is the intuition of a center of the personality, a central point in the psyche to which everything is related, by which everything is organized, and which is itself a source of energy.
 
Chance seemed to be at work, because this discovery occurred at a time when Rodella was researching all areas of knowledge to identify the symmetrical organization around the circle and the square in order to expand his plastic and scientific culture.





Guided by his discoveries, he now perceived the omnipresence of symmetrical forms, particularly those organized around the circle and the square, in all aspects of life: nature, culture, architecture, technology, even the organization of living things, from the spider's web to the honeycombs of bees. It was from this vision that his aesthetic deciphering grid was born, which could rightly be called his "squaring of the circle."





"By relying on these images," Jung wrote, "I could observe, day after day, the psychic transformations that were taking place within me...
My mandala drawings were cryptograms about the state of my Self…
I saw how my Self, that is, the totality of myself, was at work."






Jung would keep these drawings as rare pearls and by dint of meditating on them, he understood that his mandalas, which means circle in Sanskrit, were part of a process of "formation-transformation at the origin of "the eternal activity of eternal meaning." according to his own words.
  



Jung would even go so far as to say that these images appeared to him as the monad that he was and which is his world or, in other words, that these images expressed the totality of the personality or that they corresponded to the microscopic nature of the soul.




Finally, to conclude, how can we not think of Rodella's artistic approach and his fractals when Jung writes in My Life :
"I knew that I had reached with the Mandala as an expression of the Self, the ultimate discovery that it would be given to me to reach. Another may know more, but not me."
CG Jung