This project confronts the visitor with the challenge of creating his own version of a Mondrian painting, using the modern artist’s reduced vocabulary. Within the space of the screen, the visitor can thus lay out as he pleases the black lines and red, blue, yellow or white rectangles. What appears at the outset as a pleasant game becomes an exercise similar to the learning of new tools on Internet, which is often done as an autodidact, with its share of struggle, trials and errors, and mitigated results. The construction of the image seems easy at the beginning (like the common belief supposes when it comes to abstract art. . . ), but it proves more difficult than imagined, and success is far from assured. The work deals with the possibilities of creation and the accessibility of tools on Internet, giving the illusion that, in the end “each man is an artist” (Beuys).

The phenomenon of the democratization of creation becomes manifest, as well as its sometimes doubtful results. This project also refers to the tradition of visual arts with which Web art competes, an often unfavorable comparison since it does not have the same tools, the same possibilities of sophistication, the same tradition as the visual arts and the media always escapes the
author’s full control. This comparison does not take account of the particular Web characteristics. This work forms part of the many works in the new media, and particularly the Internet, which make the artist an initiator, an ideator, and leave it up to participants to define the contents. This concept of art, more and more widespread, is better adapted to the Web because it takes into account the possibilities and new avenues it offers.

Sylvie Parent: HOMMAGE TO MONDRIAN, CIAC Magazine, Montreal 1999