Pascal River
dal 17/1/2003 al 1/3/2003
Segnalato da
17/1/2003
Pascal River
Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier
Le Contrat de Confiance. Contract of trust With the works on view today, Pascal Rivet ushers in a vast field of reflection about work. He belongs to the generation of artists who are steeped in popular culture and particularly focused on the social and human dimension of their approach. In the gallery he is showing life-size replicas of a Darty van, a tractor and a Domino's Pizza moped fleet.
Le Contrat de Confiance
Contract of trust With the works on view today, Pascal Rivet ushers in a vast field of reflection about work. He belongs to the generation of artists who are steeped in popular culture and particularly focused on the social and human dimension of their approach. In the gallery he is showing life-size replicas of a Darty van, a tractor and a Domino's Pizza moped fleet. The choice of vehicles is in each instance bound up with a specific professional area.
The almost perfect character of the imitation refers to the idea of lifelikeness in the images.
Images which have always intrigued Pascal Rivet(*) and which now function in 3D mode. However, these sculptures have no autonomous object value.
They are devised as tools to be tried out by the real and the concrete, going beyond the ambiguity between utilitarian function and aesthetic function. Actually, no matter how spectacular they may be, they are merely a step in the project in progress, means without ends, kinds of transitional objects, and go-betweens of experience. Pascal Rivet challenges the status of the object, in particular by placing the Dartymobile and the IH Tractor in a precise context, complementing the most ordinary reality. The weirdness of the objects, set in urban or rural space as it so happens, does not fail to create novel situations and exchanges. Photographs record and attest to actions and movements, meetings and moments of complicity, like so many landscapes or portraits. Or alternatively a rather droll video has discreetly recorded the reactions and remarks of passers-by coming upon this unexpected type of vehicle.
Realism simplifies the initial contact with the artistic gesture and makes it possible to embark upon discussions, and compare differing viewpoints--the artist's with the farmer's, the deliveryman's, the pork butcher's and the security guard's(**). In the end of the day, what really matters resides in the circulation, in the strict sense of the word as much as in the metaphorical sense, otherwise put the sense of being transported and transporting oneself from one place to another. Over and above its function in social and economic life, work thus also designates this space that is appropriate for movement and transformation, liaising and implementing, effort and pleasure.
Pascal Rivet abandons the infiltration of the medium of the media and draws a little closer to a reality which perforce eludes us, but authorizes every manner of make-believe. These nomadic sculptures nurture the collective imagination, and summon a universality versus the generalities which make laws and prompt micro events against the main information.
Céline Mélissent
* Pascal Rivet is essentially known for his work to do with the world of sport, and for his marked interest in the media, which turn images into icons and the most trivial reality into mythology.
** The artist has also produced a travelling butcher's truck and has it in mind to produce a Brink's armoured van.
texte:Céline Mélissent
translated by Simon Pleasance
Frac Languedoc-Roussillon
4 rue Rambaud F34000
Montpellier