Webdrawings' by Stefano Chiodi Roma, 2005

“I use the Internet too much. I’m on it all the time, non-stop, when I work, when I’m tired of working, when I’m looking for an airline ticket to leave on vacation, when I need to calm my nerves. In short, I’m a pretty typical victim, but I don’t suffer too much from it. So when I see the screens drawn by Valéry Grancher, this surprising catalogue of inexhaustible flux of images and words, catalogue by definition impossible and absolutely provisional, I ask myself if he has ever felt, as I have, this sensation of losing footing, of sometimes being too quickly absorbed in a whirlpool of forms, of a message completely understandable, of course, but at bottom enigmatic and vaguely menacing. Because that is precisely my feeling when I flip through this surprising book, Internet Drawings. Pencil drawings, or markers maybe, white paper, material. Without mentioning the stopping of time. Does he take himself for the last painter? Or does he simply need a memory device? Strange diary, collage by chance, calculation ? And what choice is meant? Yes, the choice is perhaps the key. Let’s look closer then: museums, foundations, artists, galleries? in short, the art world. A phenomenology sub specimen internetis ? That is to say he’s not talking to us about about graphics, or interfaces or interactivity, happily, but about a fugitive, ungraspable, subtle object ? Art as a substance that resists transformations, as a procedure rather than a technique? What appears in these pages is the diagram of a secret voyage in which the stages are not defined: happy meetings? Deceptions? Misadventures? We are left in uncertainty. Clearly these traces, hesitant, that keep all the hand’s clumsiness, are not here to remind us of all the many-colored charms of web sites, but rather to let us perceive their ephemeral reality, this ‘human’ dimension, mortal and disordered, that continues to inhabit us.”

Stefano Chiodi Roma 2005