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Ernest Pignon-Ernest
Ernest Pignon-Ernest, artiste incontournable de la scène française, se livre sur son parcours et son processus de création dans cet ouvrage édité par le FHEL à l'occasion de sa grande rétrospective. Pionnier de l'art urbain, il dévoile 50 ans d'interventions dans l'espace public à travers ses installations, dessins et son oeuvre de photographe. De Nice à Naples, Alger, Grenoble ou Soweto, il investit les murs du monde entier et colle ses dessins, figures poétiques et engagées, faisant de la ville son atelier et le théâtre des combats qu'il dépeint : Rimbaud à demi effacé dans les rues de Paris, Pasolini en Pieta caravagesque, couple expulsé collé sur le mur de son immeuble détruit, ouvrier au corps abîmé par le travail ou personnages fantomatiques se tenant dans des cabines téléphoniques. A ce témoignage, viennent s'ajouter les éclairages de Jean de Loisy : éléments biographiques, historiques, analyses d'oeuvres ou extraits des poètes qui habitent l'oeuvre de l'artiste. Edition bilingue français/anglais.
216 pages, Hardcover
Published April 15, 2022
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August 5, 2022
I'll stick to the images which speak louder than any commentary by Pignon himself or anyone else in the form of quotes. Ernest Pignon-Ernest is the living proof that the important thing is and remains to be Ernest, even if Oscar Wilde used it, at least the English word "earnest," with the double entendre of the Christian name, oh so nice indeed, and of the obvious euphemism for Oscar Wilde's sexual innuendo, at the same time trivial and serious, trivial in the vulgarity of sexuality we will say standard, girls and boys fighting for the conquest of a nothing at all anyway, and the seriousness that it is rather a question of being honest with oneself when, the girls, one has more than enough, bored of or with them, especially that in addition it is necessary to make do with the mother and all the in-laws, without counting one’s own family who triumphs over an alliance which brings back much more than a man or a woman, that is to say, a fortune.
Ernest Pignon-Ernest is obsessed with men – especially when sometimes they are a woman – involved and transported in and into the suffering of the world which becomes the suffering of the artist. But never ask the question of how he can share some suffering he has not experienced. Empathy is a fundamental human dimension that allows everyone to experience the suffering – or happiness – of others without ever coming close to it. Audin died under the torture of a group of French military torturers in Algiers and one of the members of this group was, is, and always will be a famous J-P (false initials to fool the censors). We are not supposed to talk about this unit and the people who participated in it because it is an absolute top secret forever hidden away from scrutiny – at least some people wish it were. This allows J-P to make some nice (“Jolies” in French) Pirouettes, or young (“Jeunes” in French) Marionnettes, even if they have become rarer due to his dementia.
But the important thing is not the pictorial works of the artist reproduced in large numbers, but the fact that each work becomes an unprecedented event because hundreds, or even more than a thousand of these serigraphs in series are displayed, pasted, exposed, exhibited everywhere in a city, and particularly in abandoned, deconstructed, destroyed areas, of the type of a no-man's-land for the lumpenproletariat so much cherished by Karl Marx. The work is then the photo of the serigraph in the real surrounding frame of its exhibition, on this ruined wall, against this industrial wasteland, in front of a street squat, under a bridge, or in the rain of a cruelly segregated city like Paris, Naples and some others.
The Commune then becomes only the commemoration of its defeat and its massacre on the steps of the Sacré Coeur in Paris of course. Rimbaud only attracts attention because he was raped on the barricades of the Commune by a band of revolutionaries who believed that raping a 17-year-old boy, even if he wanted to be, was able to change the world. It didn't happen and Rimbaud became a mythical specter with windy soles on a sandy road full of ruins and all sorts of waste. He will die of syphilis, probably, abandoned by all, or almost, and especially by Verlaine.
The world of Pignon-Ernest is a world of deconstruction, demolition, dehumanization, mental, religious, ethical, and simply human decrepitude. But the project is never to simply represent the character or characters concerned. It is their reproduction in great number and the collage of these multiple images in an urban derelict setting especially made of ruins, aborted exploitation, even and especially when it is a woman who aborts, or immigrants, displaced persons, expelled persons, mutilated persons, crucified persons, and so on, and so forth, like Jesus always behind and hiding in his shroud but never really mentioned. Would this be too right-wing for a man who prides himself on being left-wing and therefore secular – “laïque” as they say in French, would it not?
At the end of the day – and certainly not after action, even military, because I am past my prime – it is a world in decomposition that we are shown in the flesh of a man – even when he is a woman – who is crumbling into dust and being cut up into slices, pieces, chunks, which themselves are fragmented and which make us forget about the mooring dicks so dear to all the Bretons, including Jacques Brel, without which there is no effective anchorage in any vital port, and certainly not hormonal anchorage with some intimate partner
Try to survive this artist and find one or two men in the world – even if they are women – who would save the human race with a bit of beauty and love.
To love the corpse that one carries in one’s two arms is only an unfinished burial. I suffer for the dead body that is carried around as if it were a piece of luggage. One feels like asking: "But where is the locker room or the morgue?"
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Ernest Pignon-Ernest is obsessed with men – especially when sometimes they are a woman – involved and transported in and into the suffering of the world which becomes the suffering of the artist. But never ask the question of how he can share some suffering he has not experienced. Empathy is a fundamental human dimension that allows everyone to experience the suffering – or happiness – of others without ever coming close to it. Audin died under the torture of a group of French military torturers in Algiers and one of the members of this group was, is, and always will be a famous J-P (false initials to fool the censors). We are not supposed to talk about this unit and the people who participated in it because it is an absolute top secret forever hidden away from scrutiny – at least some people wish it were. This allows J-P to make some nice (“Jolies” in French) Pirouettes, or young (“Jeunes” in French) Marionnettes, even if they have become rarer due to his dementia.
But the important thing is not the pictorial works of the artist reproduced in large numbers, but the fact that each work becomes an unprecedented event because hundreds, or even more than a thousand of these serigraphs in series are displayed, pasted, exposed, exhibited everywhere in a city, and particularly in abandoned, deconstructed, destroyed areas, of the type of a no-man's-land for the lumpenproletariat so much cherished by Karl Marx. The work is then the photo of the serigraph in the real surrounding frame of its exhibition, on this ruined wall, against this industrial wasteland, in front of a street squat, under a bridge, or in the rain of a cruelly segregated city like Paris, Naples and some others.
The Commune then becomes only the commemoration of its defeat and its massacre on the steps of the Sacré Coeur in Paris of course. Rimbaud only attracts attention because he was raped on the barricades of the Commune by a band of revolutionaries who believed that raping a 17-year-old boy, even if he wanted to be, was able to change the world. It didn't happen and Rimbaud became a mythical specter with windy soles on a sandy road full of ruins and all sorts of waste. He will die of syphilis, probably, abandoned by all, or almost, and especially by Verlaine.
The world of Pignon-Ernest is a world of deconstruction, demolition, dehumanization, mental, religious, ethical, and simply human decrepitude. But the project is never to simply represent the character or characters concerned. It is their reproduction in great number and the collage of these multiple images in an urban derelict setting especially made of ruins, aborted exploitation, even and especially when it is a woman who aborts, or immigrants, displaced persons, expelled persons, mutilated persons, crucified persons, and so on, and so forth, like Jesus always behind and hiding in his shroud but never really mentioned. Would this be too right-wing for a man who prides himself on being left-wing and therefore secular – “laïque” as they say in French, would it not?
At the end of the day – and certainly not after action, even military, because I am past my prime – it is a world in decomposition that we are shown in the flesh of a man – even when he is a woman – who is crumbling into dust and being cut up into slices, pieces, chunks, which themselves are fragmented and which make us forget about the mooring dicks so dear to all the Bretons, including Jacques Brel, without which there is no effective anchorage in any vital port, and certainly not hormonal anchorage with some intimate partner
Try to survive this artist and find one or two men in the world – even if they are women – who would save the human race with a bit of beauty and love.
To love the corpse that one carries in one’s two arms is only an unfinished burial. I suffer for the dead body that is carried around as if it were a piece of luggage. One feels like asking: "But where is the locker room or the morgue?"
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
Displaying 1 of 1 review