Major commission. Commissioned by Dior, Paris, for distribution on social feeds.
For Jonathan Anderson’s debut show, the essay was commissioned to highlight the fashion house and Christian Dior’s close heritage to art and the Impressionist movement — and to analyze two major works by Jean-Siméon Chardin featured at the debut show.
Christian Dior ran a gallery before he ran a fashion house — showing Dalí and Giacometti before the New Look — and the house’s vocabulary has drawn on painting ever since. Chardin, the eighteenth century’s quiet master of still life, painted silence, attention, and domestic light; setting his canvases inside a debut runway show placed two centuries of French looking side by side.
Each essay is an algorithmic essay — a short film and writing in the sequence that constitutes Codex Algorithm, the major conceptual artwork of Matthew Olivier. The work is made in the algorithmic feed itself — the medium the artist claims for the work — and composed for that feed: made for it, not adapted to it. All essays are written by the artist; the narrator’s voice is rendered through synthesis as a deliberate mask.
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