Bébé Lune

The chosen spot was a large open country far from everywhere: a place from where the observer had a wide view of the landscape, with the implacable skyline for the only line of sight. This skyline led to the apparition of images. Everything fell into place easily: the rule of the exhibition amounted to a line, a graphic incision methodically developing time in space. With such a clear conception, no shock, nor jolt, nor derailment to be feared. Nevertheless everything raced out of control. The speed of the stars, the speed of the comets, the speed of the planets ! The daystar lighting up everything, in a monochrome red glow ! A strange and psychic strength was orchestrating a series of visions embracing the whole cosmos.

We had to face reality.

There we met: eroticized, sometimes Siamese twin duos, whose sexual attributes or hairy attire were captivating ; the Thing clothed in its stony skin ; sylvan riot policemen; the piercing eyes of a badger, of a boar, of a monkey, of a pig and of an owl ; a character with an anthropomorphic flower ; a dog with a robot.

Grotesque confrontations followed the dramas of the landscape.

The bodies entered into incomprehensible but nevertheless authentic dialog.

WHEN WAS HATCHED PYTHAGORE’S MURDER ? No one could tell. However, the daddy of the Theorem, a plastic square stuck between his two eyes, ends up resting on the ground of this suddenly mournful landscape. Above the horizon, suspended very high in the sky, a lovely moon Baby was hanging over the scene of the crime.

NOTES (IN ORDER TO KNOW MORE OR LESS)

TIMELINE

At the moment, Guillaume Pinard is working on a new catalogue. An interview runs along this edition : every time the text brings up a work, its image appears, which links up very different works according to their age or kind. Inflexibly, the text guides the apparition of the images. In the same formalist way, this new exhibition of the artist at gallery Anne Barrault abides by a quite simple rule, and is reduced to a line along which the works made in about the last past three years are put.

This travelling-exhibition, mingling paintings and drawings in pastels, draws a hallucinatory landscape, an area full of improbable neighborhood.

ASTRAL TITLES

Death, sex, Nature, the quest for beauty: the themes in art are quite limited, and of course Guillaume Pinard does not elude these universal questions. To add spice to the subject, for some time, the cosmos has called him. He has just made a monochrome in dry pastel for the very first time.

When the title of the exhibition was to be chosen, moon Baby was obvious for him, a nice title, a little silly, a title you would not think of giving to an exhibition. But banco for the cosmic dimension !

For your information, moon Baby is also the title of a song sung by Zabou (Breitman) for Club Dorothée in 1987. Wearing a moonlike Pierrot outfit in a makeshift clip, Zabou sings the last words of this lullaby her mother sang to her when she was little : “Here I have no more moon, for it has flown away/ A light and white feather in the clouds/ Dream moon baby, dream baby.”

ENLIGHTENING OR CONFUSING PIECES

For a long time Guillaume Pinard has been obsessed by the question of the portrait and has commented or questioned this subject very often : how much lifelike must a face be represented ?

“In all my paintings, there are always eyes looking. It is a reflex. When I do not know what to paint, I paint a head. I do like this way of being looked at by what you are looking at.”

“To paint a portrait means bringing about some kind of absence.”

“In fact, any work is a face, and I want to be confronted with this face to face. I want to answer a signal. These drawings are a way of answering the one who speaks to me from beyond, without really knowing what this place is.”

“If a portrait brings about an absence, does a portrait gallery represent a court of ghosts?”

“Either you do not represent a face at the risk of fetishizing it, or you continually transform its shape.”

“In the paintings I am attracted to, the faces always give me the feeling they come from very far and yet they have already room in me when I meet them, as if I were their counter-shape, a regenerator with which the new clamor of their omens can be revealed.”

LANDSCAPES

There are many landscapes in pastels in the exhibition, in which the chromatic range shines with saturated and powdered colors. Models of the kind, from which Guillaume Pinard catches the vitality, sometimes inspire them : for example, among others, Arnold Böcklin, Camille Corot, Antoine Watteau or Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Sometimes too, the artist uses his own photographic sources, just for a change. In his landscapes, according to the principle of collage, Guillaume Pinard swaps some figures for other ones: new comers in the scenery, here is a Dalmatian, or a badger. These bucolic scenes could easily evoke a primordial, Eden like, without boundaries world. However, the bodies are unusually exposed in this untranquil, and tense with energy nature. Both static and vibrating, floating and heavy, serene and unquiet, in which contradictory scenario are they the protagonists?

Eva Prouteau
March 2019