Julien Espagnon is a generative artist who combines code-based image-making with plotter drawing, translating algorithmically generated shapes into physical works on paper and canvas using a plotter, a robotic arm fitted with pens or markers. Originally trained as a web designer, he moved from interactive design into generative art, developing a practice built on the interplay between digital output and hand-drawn plotter lines.
Espagnon studied applied arts before completing a master's degree in interactive design, where he taught himself programming through interactive installations and generative art. In 2015 he joined the digital communication agency Spintank as an interactive designer, later working there as a web developer until 2020. He then became a freelance designer and developer.In 2017 he began 365 Shapes of Blue, a year-long daily project in which he coded a single animated shape each day using the programming environment Processing, working within a self-imposed 500x500 pixel format restricted to the colour blue.He soon began transposing these digitally generated shapes onto paper with a plotter, a search for plasticity that became the basis of his practice.
In 2020 Espagnon began Sisyphe, un lendemain with the photographer Florence Cardenti, pairing her photographs of rock formations with generative shapes he drew over them by plotter.For the Tezos stand at Art Basel Paris+ in the Grand Palais Éphémère in October 2022, he created Allégories booléennes, a series of 600 unique variations minted live on fxhash, each image generated only at the moment of purchase.In 2023 he made Stella Nova for “Generative Abstraction and Beyond”, organised by Verse and Expanded Art, an abstract visual interpretation of a supernova explosion built through a progression from figurative renderings toward geometric abstraction.Across 2024 he developed CRYPSIS, selecting 40 finished works from more than 800 generated outputs and extending the project into 15 acrylic-marker canvases exploring colour and texture.That year he also released Metakinetic, his fourth fxhash project, a 256-edition series that let him produce the same plotter drawing at different paper sizes while preserving its proportions.
From March to June 2024 he showed four plotter-and-acrylic canvases from the series Light On Shapes in the group show “Art & Systems” at 37xDubai, and built an interactive installation letting visitors generate their own plotter drawings.In October 2025 his physical translations of code appeared in “CODE + MATTER” at 17 Rue Chapon in Paris during Art Basel Paris week, alongside Alexis André, William Mapan and Florian Zumbrunn.,
