History :
Oniroscopism was first a photographic style created and patented in 2004 by San Damon. This photographic process is only silver, which allows, during the development phase, different stages concretizing the particularity of Oniroscopism, allowing in particular a light whose architecture is transgressed, natural colors that are transfigured and unusual shooting axes. His works are generally very large format prints. Another of these steps also takes place during the shooting, via filters of the artist's work.
His Damon is a photographer-plastician, author, composer and sculptor, which leads him not to confine himself to the art of photography alone. Between 2006 and 2008, his photographic style branched off by developing other artistic disciplines, always with an intellectual connotation, such as sculpture, music, literature "mainly poetry". San Damon, who holds the intellectual and legal conception of it, wrote an Oniroscopic treatise "Axioms and Theorems", if Oniroscopism is a style, it has necessarily become a movement in itself. He describes a shift to another world where we become witnesses to an identity that we know and yet is no longer quite the same. He takes the spectator to task, who becomes a witness and plunges into the magma of the unknown as if he were stripped of all his usual knowledge. To take this damonnian neologism, he is "nudified", and thrown into the immensity of the unusual, the unpublished; chromatic vertigo envelops him. He undoubtedly plays on both emotion and technique.
Photography :
The colours are mainly shades between ochres and Sienese earth as well as between blues and blacks (particularly deep). Between these two color ranges San Damon gives Oniroscopism a great variability of tonalities since it has managed to obtain 32 color shades per color. Colours whose finesse and subtlety are reminiscent of the possibilities offered by pigmentations generally rendered in painting.
While some aspects of his oniroscopic works remain obscure in terms of rendering, particularly in terms of the naturalness of colours, light and how to isolate certain areas, which mainly makes up the objects and points of the patented deposit, it is known with certainty that San Damon uses a series of filters from his production that allow variations in light, colours and a surprising luminosity produced on paper, which is generally only obtained on a backlit screen.
But Oniroscopism also consists of a second step, outside the process for the blow. This step is a destructuring of the light and a setting up of shooting axes that are often in false angles, dives or perspectives making the evidence at first glance as "voluntarily" unfit for reality. The games, light-axis-colour, of Oniroscopism give a different interpretation to reality, to which is often added an impression of movements in a complex form that diverts it even further from the first evidence, in order to obtain a kind of trompe-l'oeil doubt.
The most famous oniroscopic works are :
Christ, a heritage of the Museum of Modern Art of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Brussels.
The Last Supper in thirteen acts, heritage of Maredsous Abbey, Belgium.
Two triptychs, owned by the Museum of Literature and Archives of Brussels, are located in the reading room of the same museum, the first on the theme of the city of Brussels and the second on the theme of the city of New York. Eight documentary films screened in different universities around the world and which are visible on the Internet. In these four films, thirty-two eminent intellectuals and academics express themselves on Oniroscopism.
San Damon S.O.I., an entity of eleven works, is located in the National Museum of Photography of Québec, Canada.
Sculptures :
Onioscopist sculptures are geometric characters, animal or human, that ignore the usual characteristics of a face, but whose emotions and words are nevertheless understood, which is due in particular to the orientation of a curved bar that crosses the oval of said face, reminiscent of a kind of hat giving orientation and expressions to said face. The important position of the body further increases this feeling. They are called SOG (Sculpture Oniroscopiste Géométrique)
Description of the works :
San Damon has established a common point between his photographic and sculptural works through the axes. He has developed the latter as he usually does them in photography, diving or underwater, thus making possible various perspectives accentuated by the triangularity of the bodies. Sometimes isosceles, sometimes scalenes or equilateral. This triangularity is interrupted by two circles, an oval to define the head and a round to define the pelvis.
These intertwined geometries are perfectly distinguished by the purification of the line. Perspectives change according to where you look at them; the expression of the body manifests and also develops another vision of things or, more exactly, of the thing seen by identification, as soon as you move around it. The space taken by the work, on the other hand, seems to be modified by the nuances of width that there are, for example, between the arms and forearms or, again, by the position of the body but also by an indefinable sensation that the character is addressing the viewer or a fictional interlocutor.
The characters are mainly ochre, earth-of-Siena or broom yellow in colour and the bases, gentian blue or anthracite, colours that often appear in San Damon's photographic works.
Sometimes there is a table, without a tray, only a circle, or a chair whose legs, seat and backrest are only three right angles in succession in order not to disturb the geometry of the characters.
Material : Oniroscopic sculptures are mainly made of drawn steel, polished by sandblasting or shot blasting. The metallization is made with hot zinc and the paint is of the ral type (paint generally used for this type of work and known for its reliability over time). Outside of private collections, one of them is located for life on a roundabout in Portugal, in the entity of Santa Maria da Feira, whose name is: Danonaselo.
Oniroscopist Musical Works :
San Damon composed this musical work in 15 movements, which does not exist in classical music, referring to the colours of his photographic works and the words he wrote to refer to them. It was performed as a world premiere in the arena of the Brussels planetarium on 21 January 2016. In the 35-metre diameter dome, 178 of his photographic works were projected on the theme of New York.
Orchestration is here thought of as a symphony with its tonal system and diatonic scale that follows a course that seems logical at first glance when a dissonant compound conception occurs between notes that give the impression of instability and/or annoyance. The dodecaphonism dear to Arnold Schönberg or Anton Weber remains at a distance. Here is brought by, certainly, a series of notes emancipated from the tonal system, an approach that is still different, because strange words are spoken, which brings it musically. A poetry derived from Damon's texts but not interpreted in its entirety, words are like sounds that espouse or partition the tonal composition, the meaning is coherent, the urban sounds that intervene throughout the work are formally
incoherent but the whole oniroscopic symphorapsody, and this is what is troubling, becomes coherent again.
We can say that at times, when all the elements of oniroscopism are combined, we seem to perceive a color for one instrument, a variant of this color for another instrument of the same family, a word for a color, a synonym of this word for a variation of this color. A word meaning a note of an instrument combined with a color or its variant, or a word and its synonyms related to an instrument and its scales. An instrument coupled to a color and/or this color would be signified by different words or a photographic work to a sentence supported by a series of chords and harmonies.
Installation of Oniroscopist Art :
Oniroscopism has its major colors, magenta is part of it, it is for this reason that San Damon staged an installation called: "Analysis of the sophism and refraction of Oniroscopism". This consisted in installing a four-kilometre transmutation of light sources in urban areas on the prestigious Franklin Roosevelt Avenue. In other words, road lights were wrapped in reddish magenta filters and pedestrian lights in purplish magenta filters. This work remained in place from January 14, 2015 to March 15, 2015.