Claiming affiliation with neo-surrealism, Jocelyn Robert constructs enigmatic and futuristic worlds from found or artificially generated images, which he overlays, merges, transforms, and assembles. His creations, akin to digital collages, stem from a process inspired by the surrealists’ practice of automatic writing—a form of digital wandering guided by intuition.
Without a predetermined plan, he collects visual fragments during his explorations and arranges them to bring forth strange and dreamlike visions, as if emerging from the depths of the unconscious. His singular imagery teems with references to circus culture, hybrid and anthropomorphic animals, cyborgs, airplane and submarine crashes—motifs that, in their juxtaposition, blur boundaries and defy expectations.
In his work, Jocelyn Robert multiplies nods to surrealist painters, extending their legacy into a resolutely contemporary aesthetic where technology becomes a vehicle for poetry. Through a practice that combines rigor and intuition, he seeks—like his predecessors—to unleash the forces of the unconscious and summon latent narratives that feel both familiar and discordant.
An interdisciplinary artist and researcher, Jocelyn Robert has been integrating technology and computing into his practice for over thirty years. Artificial intelligence, image vectorization, and graphic processing software are all tools that feed his imagination, push its boundaries, and enrich his visual language. The digital realm becomes a true laboratory—an inexhaustible field of exploration, the extension of his inner world.
In the series De la chambre bleue, this approach takes on a form of narrative tenderness. The works unfold like a catalogue of memories tied to stories that have yet to happen. “They evoke those images one thinks they glimpse in the eyes of a loved one gazing up at the morning sky, a quiet kitchen where solitary exceptions gather, a long-awaited oasis, the one lit by the light at the end of the tunnel, the bestiary that populated the ceiling of the blue room when my bed became a stagecoach. Dates or dwellings, the pervasive smell of damp paper. The world as it is upon waking, before coffee and newspapers have done their work.
I try to map onto the image the world as I see it—with clowns, circuses, hybrid animals hiding behind the curtains and others showing up at the kitchen table, turtles and submarines, TV screens and clouds, insomnias, sinking airplanes, and fragments of the blue room’s wallpaper.” — Jocelyn Robert
