The Japanese collective Excalibur projects us - not without nostalgia - into the world of Nintendo and arcade terminals from the 1980s. The city of Tokyo is becoming a potential playground for game. It also takes up certain codes of Japanese popular culture. Passionate about Final Fantasy, a video game developed from the work of the visual artist Yoshitaka Amano became game designer for the occasion. He draws from this ambivalence his desire to produce works combining plastic arts and video games.

In this series called “UKIYO.E”, the composition of the pixel artwork of Excalibur, plays as much on the codes of the video game that it is reminiscent of nineteenth-century Japanese prints (YUKIYOE). Pixels and Currents urban landscapes are associated with the framing and a construction of the inherited perspective Japanese engraving. The recurrent purple color in the work of the collective evokes at the same time, the imperial and sacred color of ancient Japan and the neon lights that illuminate the metropolises at night. Excalibur thus exploits a possible confusion between the virtual and the real.