Matt DesLauriers

Matt DesLauriers is a Canadian generative artist and developer whose subdued, sophisticated work often explores the forms of changing landscapes and terrains. Through talks, classes, workshops, and open-source code, he has played an influential role in promoting generative art as a practice. His work has been exhibited internationally at Kunsthalle Zürich in Switzerland, MoCA Taipei in Taiwan, and Art Basel in Miami and Hong Kong, and it’s held in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Artworks

hachure

Hachure is a small generative art series that derives its name (and overall appearance) from the map-making technique of representing steepness and slope with simple lines, imagining the impact of erosion over thousands or millions of years. It was exhibited at the Paris Photo 2023 art fair as part of Verse and NGUYEN WAHED’s ‘In Conversation With’ group show.

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hachure (plots)

5 unique plotter drawings

Mechanical pen plotter on handmade cotton paper

30 x 30 cm

Hachure continues DesLauriers’ exploration of maps, topography, and the geological processes that shape our world. The artwork takes its name from the cartographic term "hachure," which refers to the parallel lines used in map-making to represent terrain heights.

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FOLIO

FOLIO is a generative art series minted in person at Bright Moments London using a vintage computer. Composed of ASCII glyphs in a few colors that fill the page with abstract blocky, almost textile-like structures, the collection pays homage to Frederick Hammersley’s 1960s computer drawings, Paula Claire’s concrete poetry, and other foundational works of typographic minimalism.

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Meridian

Meridian is a generative art collection depicting stratified landscapes. One of the most widely acclaimed Art Blocks Presents releases, it was produced with a JavaScript program of just 15 KB that builds up evocative geological textures using hundreds of thousands of tiny strokes of color, so works resemble sand sculptures or enormous pointillist paintings. The series has been reproduced as 100cm-tall prints for collectors and collected in the Meridian book, featuring essays and technical breakdowns.

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Subscapes

Subscapes is an Art Blocks Curated generative art series and Matt DesLauriers’s debut on the platform, featuring otherworldly landscapes inspired by topographic maps and rendered with pen-like strokes. Its JavaScript program contains elements of 3D projection, parametric geometry, noise, quadtrees, and flow fields. Still, the work feels intuitively handmade, thanks to its pen plotter style and color palettes inspired by physical media like screenprints, long-exposure photography, acrylic painting, and art made with colored pencils.

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Browse more of Matt DesLauriers' artwork here.