Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present Sept ans de réflexion, a new show by Pascal Pinaud. This is the artist's fourth collaboration with the gallery, following on from his last solo outing and the group show UPSA Dream, which he curated in 2008.
For twenty years now, Pascal Pinaud has been revisiting abstract painting, constantly exploring new possibilities - working without a stretcher, without brushes - and evincing great formal and technical originality. Working under the acronym PPP - PASCAL PINAUD PEINTRE - which he adopted in 1995, he is a talented and wryly humorous interpreter of the great myths of abstract painting, from Malevich to the present.
In this new solo show, whose gentle irony is summed up in its title - "Seven Years of Thinking About It" is also the French title of the Billy Wilder classic, The Seven-Year Itch, the film that immortalised the legs and billowing white dress of Marilyn Monroe -, Pinaud reveals his latest works, including a monumental arbre à fèves, a project he has been working on over the last five years, collecting the little figurines (known as fèves because they were originally beans) hidden in the frangipane filling of the pastry traditionally eaten in France to celebrate the twelfth day of Christmas. In this iconoclastic revisiting of popular culture, "the result," as Pinaud observes with a smile, "is a sculpture that lots and lots of people have sucked, a work of art comprising thousands of DNA samples." The artist was helped to gather these fèves by faithful collectors, friends and students at Villa Arson, where he teaches. In all, some thirty people helped collect 20,481 fèves, which the artist then arranged on a tree nearly 3.2 metres tall made of resin. "It's also a tree of life, a trophy on which there are only winners, kings and queens" (the person who gets the fève in their portion of galette becomes the king/queen, and wears the gold paper crown that comes with the pastry).
Pinaud's installation of Delftware plates continues his theme of collectionitis. Arranged randomly over the wall like an all-over, these plates that once decorated our (great) grandparents' homes break free of their modest middle class background and create a striking new environment that combines high and low in the tradition of Picabia and Kippenberger.
Tissus d'ameublement (furnishing fabrics) decorates the next walls in the gallery. The artist collected these canvases sewn by other hands and had fun inverting the motifs and reactivating Toile de Jouy, that stereotype of old-fashioned fabric. He has inserted genre scenes from Dutch painting: views of canals, windmills, forests, echoing the Delft ware, and playing reflexive games with the exhibition.
In his most recent series, the Patères (Pegs), Pinaud continues his "extramural" work, using items produced by a glassmaker for a kitchen fitter: cupboard doors, sections of glass. Without any further cutting or changing the colours, the artist assembled these pieces of glass in threesomes to create forms that evoke Constructivist art. "At the same time, I am clearly recycling, looking for ways of reusing leftovers, choosing neither the colours nor the shapes. I steal the products of a skill and try to transform them into artworks."
Another series, the Semences (Seeds), is metaphorical. Here, the artist takes the gardener's approach. "I have to seed paint in order to nourish it," explains the artist, poetically. This process consists of crushing the leads of colour pencils on the canvas, which is placed on the floor, so that the graphite can mix randomly with water.
Folk art and high art are cheek by jowl in these series, which the show presents in mixed order, as if in an artist's studio. Radical and baroque, this new exhibition refutes more emphatically than ever all linear conceptions of art.