BLISSFULLY
Virginie BARRÉ & Bruno PEINADO
14/02 >> 24/03/07
OPENING:
Thursday, 13th February – 8pm
ADN gallery is proud to present the second collaborative show of both French artists, Virginie Barré and Bruno Peinado, titled “Blissfully”.
Virginie BARRÉ and Bruno PEINADO collaborate and decide to explore together, for their show in ADN gallery, the cultural theme of the “Bliss”, this sort of universal Esperanto profiled in the 60’s as a new manifestation of utopia. Each one display a new series of artworks thought and made in symbiosis with ADN’s space, and coincide partially in the thematic without sacrificing their own creativity. If we should resume their exhibition proposal in a few words, the expression of “cultural shock” would be the most appropriate. Indeed, their work represents a collision of aesthetics and concepts from which emerges the unforeseeable. The spectator of “BLISSFULLY” is invited to moving himself into bi-dimensional works and installations as if he would be travelling around an “whole-world” aesthetics where the process of mix and do-it-yourself are the only rules.
Virginie Barré, the Piegan Indian
Virginie Barré presents at ADN a couple of mannequins, a series of four colour lambda prints and three original black and white drawings. The whole is the third part of her newest artwork series titled “Bauhaus & Indians” started in June 2006 during her solo show in Angers, France. The artist has focused on what at first seems an unlikely marriage – that of the rich cultural capital of North American Indians (Sioux, Apache or Cheyenne tribes) in fusion with the very particular aesthetic of 1920’s Bauhaus (architecture, design and typography). This illegal colonization by the Indians tribes of the rational Bauhaus’ artistic territory and the celebration of its utopian spirituality have less to do with visual antagonism than with a redistribution of the powers of reason and with a debate about the conceptual Eurocentric powers.
Even if there is a change in her creative paradigm, considering that there is no more literal narrations in her representations and that she no longer embraces the symbolization of murder and death, nevertheless Barré continues exploring the scales and space’ cuts and enhancing aesthetic and cultural contrasts. The exhibition’s display is very graphic and formalistic, with clarity and strangeness quite disturbing regarding to her critic about the rational occidental tradition, which has shaped its own clichés on the no-occidental cultures.
Virginie Barré, who defines herself as a “Piegan Indian (…) behaving with pride and boldness” develops with subtlety an irreverent and impertinent artistic practice towards art history; however, she does it with a lot of consciousness and control. With “Blissfully”, she theatralizes a surreal cohabitation at the same time that she invites us to enter and move into her intimate conceptuality, into her re-creative and imaginary world.
Bruno Peinado o the easy-going attitude….
Heir of the “Post-production” theory by Nicolas Bourriaud and of the aesthetics of chaos by Edouard Glissant, Bruno Peinado plays with the common sense of low-culture, its messages, its icons, and its collective memory in order to re-create a symbolic and syncretism atmosphere which less pretends congealing its results than re-activating them, looking for the possibility of the unforeseen. We can’t deny that his Antilles origins have influenced its artistic trajectory, especially when he defines his work as a creolization process of the occidental iconosphere with the assumed goal of putting into re-circulation all the visual codes and objects of our media environment. He embraces the perspective of an “anti-copyright” culture which no more considers the creator myth but rather affirms the right of be able to do it yourself with the readymade.
He is a ductile artist, who hasn’t studio either artistic space, who prefers making art in and within the available space and time for its exhibition. This makes him an artist always in movement, who adds or quits elements of its artworks according to the physical and social environment where he is working into, letting ideas and influences from the background go and flow without pressure, established rule, and stereotype.
For “Blissfully”, Bruno Peinado presents a series of three coloured lambda prints on diasec, an installation and two sculptures: Untitled-Dreamcatcher and Untitled- Stilldancingonjohnwayne’shead (three profiles of Indian’ heads retro-illuminated). The installation is composed of thirteen easels which support thirteen peaces of coloured and broken stadip glasses. This art piece called “Untitled-Brouillard” echoes back with the three lambda prints on diasec which seem like glass-paintings. Once again, Peinado’s work do not pretend telling stories but being the mirror of how unpredictable is our visual perception. Neither embodies the conventional political artist since Peinado takes on different identities and uses different mediums according to the environment; he plays with the social backfield with irony, formalism and an “easy-going” attitude, in an
For more information, images, contact:
ADN Galería
+34 93 451 0064
info@adngaleria.com
www.adngaleria.com
And also at the same time....
Virginie BARRÉ – “Slumberland”
COLLECTIONS DE ST CYPRIEN, StCyprien, FR
24/02 – 22/04/07
http://www.collectionsdesaintcyprien.com
