Naïf #25

"Naïf": An Introspection on Naivety

From childhood, naivety is perceived as innate. It embodies a form of purity, an absence of experience that could have altered its original essence. In young adults or adults, especially in our productivity-focused societies, naivety is often seen as a weakness, a dysfunction, or even an exploitable incompetence, subject to mockery. As if the hardening process, deemed necessary to make an individual apt and conforming, had not operated satisfactorily.

However, it is paradoxical to note that literature, as well as our personal experiences, are filled with examples where an adult's naivety is a strength, a means to overcome and transcend numerous obstacles. It's also a choice, conscious or unconscious, to apply a filter to the reality we observe and engage in.

With advanced age, there is often a return to this naivety, a rediscovery of that lost innocence. In the elderly, this quality becomes, in a way, normal and even desirable, especially when it doesn't stem from illnesses. It reflects a form of wisdom and resilience in the face of life's complexity, a way to lighten oneself before departure.

Started with doors attached to an unfinished perspective, this project became quite obsessive until revealing a meaning that I perceived as this introspection on naivety. Between art therapy and personal reflection, this work is a journey in which I visually experimented with some of my convictions that I, along the way, deconstructed.

To materialize this reflection, I designed a simple drawing, naively representing a set of celestial bodies and birds through cognitive doors. These doors, fixed on a stable structure without alteration, rest on a uniform background with a slight grain.

From this original view, I then revisited each element, altering them individually before recombining them. Constructing a background of simple objects, books, and childish patterns. I added a ground and clouds to anchor this confrontation to the terrestrial. The doors combine, opening to a broader vision while reducing the number of viewpoints. The structure is distorted, dissonant, resonant, colorful, sometimes overly so, even amplified, mirroring our personal structures constantly changing and confronted by life. The doors merge, increasing the surfaces and reducing the viewpoints. The birds have changed, the celestial bodies have moved, becoming denser, taking up more space, colliding, and tearing apart. Transparency emerged, allowing a glimpse of the entirety through our own doors. The reflections of different plans connect.

From anarchic coloring, the lines are immature, the encounters are random. This choice reflects again the desire to preserve the dissonance induced by certain encounters and the space they occupy in our internal mechanics.

This approach produced an image oscillating between disharmony and interest; sometimes pleasant, sometimes less so, even hostile or incomprehensible.

This project, in its execution, is entirely random. It was created using the p5.js, p5.noise, and chroma.js libraries.

The "S" key saves the three created images.