calendario eventi  :: 

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25/6/2007

Pierre et Gilles

Jeu de Paume, Paris

double je 1976-2007

This exhibition presents a selection of 120 works made between 1976 and 2007. Pierre et Gilles began working together in 1976, and their distinctive style has enjoyed great success ever since. Their photographs are all painted, making each one unique. They have established a distinctive visual world drawing on popular culture, mythology, magic, slapstick, religion and eroticism. The two artists explore and reinvent popular images, crossing frontiers and fuelling a collective imagination that reaches well beyond the confines of contemporary art.

Their personal pantheon is peopled by stars from the worlds of pop, rock, fashion, art, cinema and the clubbing scene, but also by unknown individuals they have met over the years. They have also produced numerous self-portraits. Each image tells a story, with the effectiveness and often cruel tenderness of tales for children.

Dazzlement, of course, is precisely what the work of Pierre et Gilles, overflowing with superlative beauty, has provided with unmatched constancy for thirty years now (Iggy Pop, 1977). But not only that. Drawing its taste for seductive visual formulas from popular aesthetics, the archetypal Pierre et Gilles image — an enhanced portrait — is also characterised by its deliberately protean and ambiguous excess. Not only is the composition beautiful, but the image is staged in a deliberately exaggerated way. The colour is extremely refined, but also over the top. The rendering is extremely precise, but also smoothed and beautified, with a turbo-charged and slightly louche kitsch spirit. The models are referred to by their first names in the titles but at the same time wrested from their concrete reality by a sartorial transfiguration and style of presentation that makes them emblems more than humans. Ambiguity is everywhere. Even in the plastic celebration of the human body. […]

Ever since they began working together, in 1976, Pierre has been the one who takes the photographs and Gilles the one who paints. That is the hallowed formula. […] Pierre et Gilles are united in life and united in their work and art, which consecrates an emotional bond that, in their case, is at the same time an aesthetic one. “For them, the creation of a work of art is a long, complex process. First, they imagine the creative idea, then they produce their preliminary sketches and look for their ideal model. Gilles finds the elements they need to make the set and Pierre does the photography. Once the photograph has been chosen and printed, Gilles paints over the image. And then they create a special frame for the work. Because the photograph is hand-painted, there can be no copy.”*

For Pierre et Gilles, photography and painting go hand in hand, expressing the concrete union of two artists and a pooling of their respective gifts. From body to medium — or, rather, from bodies to mediums. […] The medium of recording par excellence, photography here is re-materialised in the medium of painting. This retouching with paint, a highly physical act involving corporeal gesture, guarantees the uniqueness of each “photograph-painting” as well as its craftsmanlike nature and, by the same token, its symbolic added value in this, the age of the triumph of the “mechanical reproducibility” (Walter Benjamin) of the image. It is also the act that enables the transubstantiation of the image, which ceases to be a document and becomes a painting.

Paul Ardenne, Pierre et Gilles, Double je, 1976-2007, published by Taschen, Cologne, 2007, translated by Charles Penwarden

* Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, "Le plaisir populaire de Pierre et Gilles", Pierre et Gilles rétrospective, MOCA, Shanghai, 2005.

Jeu de Paume Concorde
1, place de la Concorde 75008 Paris
métro Concorde
information: 01 47 03 12 50
Hours
Tuesday: 12:00 - 21:00
Wednesday - Friday: 12:00 - 19:00
Saturday and Sunday: 10:00 - 19:00
Closed Monday
Admission: 6 €
Concessions: 3 €

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