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26/5/2011

Virginie Barre' / Bruno Peinado

Galeria ADN, Barcelona

ADN Galeria will open on May 27th the solo shows Close Up by Virginie Barré and Wild Angle by Bruno Peinado.

Virginie Barré draws her inspiration from the cultural fields of cinema, literature and comics, among others. In this exhibition, the artist presents new installations and a series of drawings recalling episodes or protagonists that marked th hi t of th moving iimage, iin t diti l cinema as well as iin cartoons. Th titl ClThe title Close U refers t a Up f to k d the history f the i traditional i ll t type of camera shooting that gets close to a character or an object and restricts thus the field of vision, excluding contextual elements.

We could say that Barré adopts the same “close up” perspective in her work, as this exhibition confirms. The viewer experiences indeed the unusual sensation to burst without authorization into a shooting or a show stage and finds characters that look as if they were misplaced and full of doubts about their own condition and role. Her installations with dummies of human figures as well as her drawings that recall the aesthetics of the storyboards or the clear figures, line of some comics or cartoons, present little fictions or rather “infra-narrations” which only unveil fragments of stories.

The situations imagined by Barré operate as the indexes or the beginnings of an upcoming event: they introduce incomplete elements of information – a character, an outfit, a behavior or a state of mind – that lead the spectator to construct his own narrative. The protagonists of Barré’s world are dreamy adults or children, “normal” people dressed up as heroes and vice versa These figures resist to identification; however precisely because of this lack of heroes, versa. however, characterization, they open a familiar dimension composed by ordinary individuals we daily bump into or we identify ourselves with. In the exhibition, we find a female dummy dressed up as an astronaut, lying on the floor as if she were lost in her dream or anesthetized, maybe to bear a large space trip. The character seems to come out from some kind of vintage, timeless, science fiction movie. From an apparently insignificant scene such as a sleeping woman, we draw up a multiplicity of hypotheses of narration, between the oniric, the unseemly and the disturbing.

Several pieces on show refer to the creative process. The puppet of a child, wearing an old Mickey Mouse costume, is sitting in a pool of black ink that seems to indicate his origin, somewhere between the imagination of his artistic “father” and the point of a drawing pen. Perhaps this child is re-creating his own tale and identifying himself with his hero, in the same way each reader or spectator does? Barré maintains an ambiguity about the identities of the characters; she invites us to speculate on the respective roles of the author and the character, and their eventual permutation.

A series of large drawings complements the exhibition. They are inspired by the cinematographic imaginary too and g g p y p y g p g y make visible the process of elaboration of the movie, through a mix of sketches and written notes. The drawings contribute to demystify the fiction and the way it is constructed. With a simple though accurate line, and colorfields, Barré reinterprets in an aesthetic and sensitive way the artificial means that keep illusion and dream alive.

Bruno Peinado’s work operates through a principle of contamination and cultural mix, melting influences and references in a way we could define as “democratic” and free from any constriction. The artist blurs the distinction between the so-called “high” culture, reserved to the elite, and a popular culture spread through communication means, cultural industry and advertizing; by doing so, he assembles eclectic elements coming from different temporalities, cultural and disciplinary fields.

The title of this exhibition shows that even language is a means of hybridization for Peinado, an artistic matter he manipulates and distorts. Wild Angle plays with the idea of a broad and open point of view (“wide angle”, corresponding to a typology of photographic lens), juxtaposed with an unpredictable “wild” dimension that resists to domestication and moves away from the common schemes and models of representation. Some images integrate with the social sphere without their media, cultural and social impact being reconsidered critically. Peinado extracts and put them in contact with other references, inviting the viewer to adopt another viewing angle. This tension can be perceived through the exhibited works; familiar signs and codes shock with alien objects “made up” by the artist objects, made-up till they become unrecognizable. Despite this, images can provoke a feeling of “déjà-vu”, like in the installation “Les Ambassadeurs”. The work takes up a model of representation considered as an exercise of mastery and sophistication during Renaissance: the anamorphosis. It applies it, ironically, to a very common and almost trivial sign of our time, the smiley.

Humor and irony have indeed a fundamental site in Peinado’s work, as devices used to mediate the inevitable clash between diverse cultures and ideals which is characteristic of our globalized world In the sculpture “Kinky Afro”, the ideals, world. Kinky Afro raised black fist (symbol, among others, of the Black Panthers’ struggle) belongs in an ironic way to a character of comics, very likely Mickey Mouse, which was often denounced as a symbol of U.S imperialism. The installation “Sans titre- I melt with you” displays national flags, objects that usually crystallize identities and patriotic feelings.

The flags are declined in eleven versions fading gradually, up to total white. Erasure does not appear here as a negative fact, but as the first condition to receive other influences and melt with them.
In accordance with this gamble on hybrid cultural forms that resonate with his own half-blood roots, the artist pays half blood tribute to a literary and political trend that brought in one of the most important social and political transformations of the last century: the “Négritude”, initiated in the second half of the 20th century. Peinado diverts a classical sculpture of Hermes, protecting god of the travelers and poets. Classical Greek sculpture is seen as a very significant step into occidental culture; in Peinado’s work, it is hijacked by other identities, black and Creole, like those of poets Aimé Césaire and Edouard Glissant, eulogists of a multi-sourced culture, cosmopolite, mobile and open.

Image: Virginie Barré, Le groupe du vendredi – Les enfants, 2010

Press office - Contact
ADN Galeria
info@adngaleria.com
+34 93 4510 064

Opening: May 27th from 7.30 p.m to 9.00 p.m

Galeria ADN
Enric Granados 49 - Barcelona
Tuesday - Friday: 10-14h / 16.30-20.00h
Saturday : 11-14h /17-00-20.30h
Monday: Scheduled visits.

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