ABOUT
OTXA Editions explores what happens when image-making is partly delegated to a system, while the decisions about what should remain are kept in human hands.
Each project begins with a generative algorithm designed to produce a particular family of forms. Rather than using it to obtain a single image, OTXA explores the possibilities of the system over time: generating, comparing, rejecting and returning to it until its visual language begins to exhaust itself.
Only a small number of images are selected.
This act of selection is central to the work. The algorithm can generate possibilities, but it cannot determine which of them should matter. The work emerges as much from what is discarded as from what is retained.
Once selected, an image undergoes another transformation. It leaves the screen and becomes a printing matrix, then ink on paper. The passage into matter changes the image: scale, density, texture and the irregularities of printing give it a physical presence that does not exist in the digital original.
This material dimension is inseparable from the project. The prints are not reproductions of digital works, but the final stage of a process in which an image moves from rule to variation, from selection to matter.
The work draws in part on a pictorial tradition in which the transformation of an image can be as important as its initial creation. Franz Kline’s enlargement of small ink studies into large paintings is one reference: a change of scale and medium could turn a modest graphic form into something radically different.
Today, as machines make the production of images increasingly immediate and abundant, these questions take on another meaning. OTXA Editions is less concerned with the ability to generate more images than with what happens afterwards: how they are looked at, judged, selected and ultimately given a physical existence.
Each System is therefore explored until its possibilities feel exhausted. A few Structures remain. The rest disappear.
Structure 156 | 2026 | Aquatint on Canson | 38x28 cm | Ed. 25
BIO
OTXA is a French artist born in Paris in 1980, now living and working in Montpellier.
Trained in visual arts at Penninghen, he later studied digital production and 3D at Supinfocom. In 2006, he co-founded the animation studio Kawanimation, where he worked with moving images, digital production and animation before progressively developing a personal artistic practice.
His work has long focused on the ways images are constructed, transformed and reproduced. Cinema, animation and images circulating online have provided material for earlier series in which existing images were extracted, altered, repeated or displaced from their original context. His 2020 solo exhibition 4ème Mur at Espace Saint-Ravy in Montpellier notably explored the multiple and the alteration of the image through works derived from film and online video.
Over time, this interest in transforming existing images has shifted toward constructing the systems capable of producing them. Custom software, generative processes and drawing machines have progressively become part of his practice, extending an ongoing dialogue between traditional and digital techniques.
OTXA Editions develops this research through printmaking. Rather than beginning with an existing image, the work begins with a set of rules: generative systems are created, explored and progressively exhausted before a small number of forms are selected and translated into physical prints.
