Florian Pugnaire & David Raffini Centre Pompidou

A jury of collectors and art world professionals selected the artistic partnership of Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini as the winners of the seventeenth annual Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard at the exhibition « The Order of Fireflies », curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard in 2015.

Their video works In Fine (2010) and Casse pipe (2010) join the Pompidou Centre’s collections, where they are on show at the museum cinema on level four from April 18 to June 6 2016.

The  Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard’s donation puts Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini’s videos alongside the works of the artists awarded the prize from 1999 to 2014: Didier Marcel, Natacha Lesueur, Tatiana Trouvé, Boris Achour, Matthieu Laurette, Mircea Cantor, Loris Gréaud, Vincent Lamouroux, Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus, Raphaël Zarka, Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille, Isabelle Cornaro, Benoît Maire, Adrien Missika, Katinka Bock, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Camille Blatrix.

In Fine (2010, HD video, 16 minutes) stages the « self-destructive performance » of a rusty old Russian digger, symbolising the Soviet Union. The film records the creation of the sculpture as a residual object emerging from the digger, with the eerie, apocalyptic atmosphere typical of their work. « The first part of the video imposes a fictional dimension and a post-apocalyptic atmosphere devoid of human presence, then the wasteland becomes the backdrop for a mechanical ballet comparable to a last dance. This then leads in fine on to a sequence of self-destruction, like the scorpion’s suicide when, cornered and with no means of escape, it turns its sting on itself ». (Extract from a text by the artists available online at http://www.florianpugnaire.com/html/infine.html)

Casse pipe (2010, HD video, 26 minutes) is a fictional mise en abîme in which the two artists play themselves playing soldiers at a re-enactment of one of Napoleon’s battles against the Austrian army. The title Casse pipe, borrowed from a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, refers to the opium pipes often snapped as a patient died during surgery on the battlefield. As the battle is re-enacted, the camera follows a deserter (played by David Raffini) in an atmosphere that evokes the end of days, getting progressively more lost in a decaying world full of empty, abandoned buildings, burned carcasses, and darkly worrying landscapes. The video features elements familiar from the artists’ body of sculptures as a whole: « The connection between fiction, archive, and process grows closer around a self-reflexive node that locks the main character into a script loop. With desertion his only option, utterly alone in the world, he wanders through ruined stage sets, a prisoner of time suspended – that characteristic moment that follows the battle. It calls to mind W. J. Has’s 1973 La Clepsydre, a Polish film in which a character visiting his father gets lost in a sanatorium and gradually loses his way in his own memories, past, and ghosts ».

Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini, born respectively in Nice in 1980 and Bastia in 1982, live and work – together or on solo pieces – in Nice and Paris. They met during their studies at the Villa Arson in Nice. To this day, they share not only a studio there, but a common guiding thread in their creative practice: foregrounding the processes involved in making art, particularly the changes apparent in everyday objects as they transmogrify into works of art. They have a particular interest in how various materials change state and the temporal space where they tip from one to the other. Producing sculptures is an integral part of their work and one that they always film to document each step of the creative process to the finished form. In terms of the objects they choose to transform, they have a clear liking for engines of various sorts, symbolising mankind’s technological development. They blow them up or transform them in all sorts of ways, so that the materials come to evoke César’s principle of compression, being submitted to all sorts of forces before being reborn in a new shape. Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini draw on video games such as Destruction Derby and Steven Spielberg’s cult 1971 film Duel, generally remaining off screen in the videos that reflect the creative process behind their works. The viewer thus sees objects being blown up in quarries or post-apocalyptic landscapes with no visible signs of human presence.

Interview of the artists in French: Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini by Anne-Frédérique Fer for FranceFineArt

« Florian Pugnaire et David Raffini: In Fine et Casse Pipe projetés à Beaubourg » by Axelle Simon for My Art Agenda