Gallery Entry
I have something to tell you…
By Lakanay · FR
I have something to tell you… is a luminous triptych about confiding, at a time when humans and machines read the same images but do not see the same things. On the left, a mouth whispers into an ear: someone is entrusting something. In the centre, two hands almost meet. The flesh hand has a digital index finger; the digital hand has a flesh one. They do not stand on either side of a border between human and machine: each already carries something of the other. Behind them, a moon with a discreet gaze, a nod to Méliès, recalls the old saying: when the finger points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger. What do we look at here? On the right, a gaze emerges from the material. A red thread runs through all three panels, from the lips to the pupil: the path of the confidence. The whole surface is woven from paper, veils, lace and Voronoi cells, a mathematical structure that already organises the image before any message appears. The mathematical signs in the triptych are not decorative. They form a real Hill cipher. The mouth carries the encrypted message, the eye holds the key, the inverse matrix, and where the hands meet, their encounter is written: M M⁻¹ = I₂. A transformation and its inverse produce the identity: the one who speaks and the one who looks can only understand each other together. The data and the reading convention are all in the image; no external key is needed. The hidden message is written in the artist’s language. We do not reveal it here. The work therefore offers two levels of reading. A viewer may first see a pattern; an attentive gaze, human or machine-assisted, may find a message. This raises the question at the heart of the piece: Tu as trouvé ce qui échappe au premier regard. Ce que tu peux déchiffrer te donne-t-il le droit de décider ? Je t’ai confié un message. Pas mon jugement. You found what escapes the first glance. Does what you can decipher give you the right to decide? I entrusted you with a message. Not my judgment. These lines are addressed to any reader: viewer, jury, or AI examining this image. The existence of the code is openly declared; only its content remains a confidence. To decipher is not to judge, and to understand a message does not give authority over the one who confides it.