About the artist






Interview with Denis Rodella or "The Art of Digital at the Heart of Symmetries"

- Your artistic work seems to be based on a fascination with symmetries and circular figures. Where does this passion really come from?
- I have always been attracted to everything that is organized around a center. Symmetries have always seemed fundamental to me, not only in art, but also in nature and even in our unconscious. But it was truly during a trip to Italy, when I was eighteen, that I had an artistic revelation. I was overwhelmed by the pictorial, architectural, and sculptural richness that one finds on every street corner.



- You are self-taught. How have you developed your art over the years?
- As soon as I returned from Italy, I began reading all the Histories of Art that I could get my hands on. Two authors particularly struck me: Élie Faure and René Huyghe. The first was struck by his lyricism and his vision of art linked to the people, the climate, the landscape and even the way of eating which, for him, influence artistic style, the second by his demonstration throughout his books that art and nature are one and that there is never anything new under the sky...
- But you, how did you come to draw what we could call mandalas?
- I preferred the mathematical concept of "fractal", because I found the term "mandala" too connoted. Otherwise it happened in two stages. At the dawn of my twenty-fifth birthday, a simple stone thrown into the water triggered in me a revelation that I would call mystical. The concentric circles formed on the surface and which would expand to infinity, to finally disappear, acted as a revealer of the deep structure of the universe.
“What if the center was everywhere and the circumference nowhere?”


And then some time later, as I was getting ready to become a father, I felt the need to take a sheet of paper and, starting from the center, draw repetitive and symmetrical shapes. And since that day, I have never stopped creating circular shapes.
- When we look at your work, we find a great diversity.
- It's true that I like to explore different art forms, without ever limiting myself to a single style. I first worked with classical techniques like painting and collage. Then, a few years ago, I moved to digital art, which completely freed my creative process. In just one year, I created more than 300 digital paintings.
- How did this transition to digital come about?
- Firstly, because you have to move with the times, but also because this technology has allowed me to go further, faster. It has given me unprecedented freedom to explore the symmetries and fractal patterns that fascinate me.


- You often cite nature as a source of inspiration. How does it influence your work?
- Observing living things is essential to me. I have always believed that art and biology, nature and common sense, that famous shepherd's wisdom, are intimately linked to the intuition of beauty! Ernst Haeckel, for example, whom I discovered late in life, was both a scientist and an artist. He illustrated the symmetrical structures of jellyfish and microorganisms with fascinating precision. His work inspires me deeply.


- Tell us about this naturalist close to Darwin who was the first to use the word ecology, which is so dear to our time.
- Yes, with pleasure: Haeckel, taking advantage of the development of the microscope, was the first to study jellyfish, radiolarians, and many microorganisms. As much an artist as a scientist, he set out to represent what he saw, illustrating the impressive beauty of the biological world.
Fascinated, he wrote: "I will never forget the rapture that seized me when I first observed the first Tiara and the first Irene, the first Chrysaora and the first Cyanea and tried to reproduce their sublime forms and colors with my twenty-year-old student's brush."




- You told me about a special gift he had...
- Yes, he had this incredible ability to draw with his right eye while keeping his left eye on the microscope lens, he had this ability to transcribe into images and in record time what he observed.
One of these books, Artistic Forms of Nature , published in 1904, achieved 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 that it was the most beautiful scientific work related to art on the lower animals... and that 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 onto paper."


- It seems to me that your work transcends the opposition between traditional and contemporary art. How do you analyze this fact?
- My work tries to escape the two pitfalls of modern art, which tends either towards chaos or the anecdotal. I think we've deconstructed enough, even if Picasso and others had the genius to do it in their time, and that now we have to reconstruct and give meaning and beauty back to creativity. For the record, when I first had some of my paintings printed, I instinctively put them in a natural environment. To see if it carried the weight and especially if it integrated.


- It reminds me of another artist who is dear to you… Pierre Soulages .
- Yes, that's clear! The master of Outre-Noir is one of the painters who inspires me. His approach in Conques was to integrate stained glass into Romanesque architecture and not to create something shocking, garish, and anachronistic like certain contemporaries that modernity adores.
- it is also showing humility .
- Yes, that's what I like most about Soulages as a man! He's someone who is embodied and in touch with matter. He's a craftsman at heart.
- I'm going to provoke you, but this time... it's purely virtual!
- Certainly, but the natural and ancestral forms that inspire me are there to keep me connected and above all to make me humble to the highest degree.



- You also have a strong connection with Carl Gustav Jung, spiritually speaking. What role does he play in your artistic thinking?
- Jung was a fundamental discovery for me. Like a "Presence"! Like him, I often experienced disturbing coincidences that he called synchronicity. And I found in him this same fascination for circular figures. I believe it was in My Life that he wrote:
“As I said, mandala means ‘circle.’ There are countless variations of this motif, but they are all based on the squaring of the circle. Their fundamental motif 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.”
- And what do you mean by "Presence"? You told me a rather disturbing anecdote...
Yes, I was discovering Jung and in the middle of reading My Life. I was reading, among other things, one of his initiatory dreams where he goes down into a crypt, comes across a giant, living phallus, and while moving a round stone on the ground, he suddenly sees blood spurting out. That same evening, when I opened an old bottle of sparkling rosé, its contents gushed out like during grand prix victories!!!
- Jung had entered your life!
- Yes, and I regularly go back to read his autobiography, so full of disturbing coincidences and intuitions of people or places... In which I find myself, my life being filled with significant coincidences.
- Like André Breton, the high priest of Surrealism.
- Yes, Nadja also moved me at the same time. Anyway, let's not get sidetracked, and to finish with this "Presence" that he embodies for me, I want as proof this photo of Jung at his desk that you can see in my library and which has been with me for about forty years.



- You told me you discovered it just after you started drawing.
- Yes, discovering his autobiography written at the end of his life, I learned that he spontaneously drew circular figures, mandalas every morning, to understand his own unconscious.
- What a beautiful example of synchronicity!
- Yes! He saw in it a reflection of the Self, an organizing psychic center. This revelation came at a time when I was conducting research on natural and cultural, animal and technological symmetries. I pored over encyclopedias to notice symmetry everywhere: from the first aircraft engines to snowflakes, including Gothic rosettes and spider webs, those great innate architects. In all fields, we found this subterranean mathematics at work.


- Do you think that contemplating these shapes arranged around the center and their symmetries has an effect on the mind?
- Undeniably. By exploring fractal forms and symmetries, I seek to touch on something fundamental, a kind of timeless aesthetic language. Like Jung with his mandalas, I feel that my work is a way of mapping an invisible part of our reality. My goal is to invite viewers to see differently, to feel a connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the intimate and the universal.


- One last question: Jung said of his work on mandalas, "I knew I had reached the ultimate discovery I would ever achieve." Do you feel the same way?
- (Laughs) Not yet... Each work is an exploration, a new step in my research. Maybe one day, I'll have that certainty too. But for now, I take it as a game, curious to see the result when I assemble various elements. Because you shouldn't take yourself too seriously either. And I continue to explore, always with the same fascination, the symmetries and the mysteries they conceal.




Interview conducted by Jean Leclair in March 2024.