Fernand
On October 6, 2022, Dutch art experts meticulously discovered and restored a hidden Fernand Léger artwork on the backside of Le 14 Juillet (The 14th of July). The newly discovered masterpiece would be titled Fumée sur les toits (Smoke on the Roofs) and dated sometime between 1911 and 1912. After the enormous revelation, the Triton Collection Foundation would ask Harm van den Dorpel and Jan Robert Leegte to create pieces that reflected on Fumée sur les toits. The Triton Collection wanted to combine Léger’s avant-garde style with today’s contemporary digital avant-garde figures. Both pieces created by Dorpel and Leegte would be exhibited at the Kröller-Müller Museum as part of the Analogous to Léger exhibition. Harm van den Dorpel would create Fernand, a full-screen software piece based on 25 drawings Dorpel freehanded using a laptop touchpad. The drawings gradually merge and evolve into new compositions of unexpected and emergent images. Monaco Mix, a digital art collection minted via left gallery in 2018, can be seen as a predecessor to Fernand as it relies on the same concept of aleatory combinations of hand drawn images to generate an infinite stream of unique compositions. Monaco Mix featured input drawings created by Rita Vitorelli.
Twenty-five drawings, each based on a work by Fernand Léger, drawn with a laptop touchpad, overlapping in time, in ever changing order, by Harm van den Dorpel.