Pierre Ardouvin Ghost Heads Soup
For more than ten years, Pierre Ardouvin’s work has been as obvious visually as it has remained unsettled in psychological terms. In it an exacerbated material simplicity contrasts with psychic trouble, creating dissonances and splits from percepts to affects. Light is gloomy, magic is murky, the everyday is a fairy tale, partying is grim. Everywhere tawdriness imperceptibly changes into pallidness, the glitter becomes blinding, preciosity gets cheap. These are tensions rather than paradoxes, though: behind his deceptively humorous or offhand gestures, Pierre Ardouvin is developing a work that is hard, inflexible, irreconciled with the world. The manifest evidence of apparatuses, which generally do not in the least conceal their simplicity, shows a rough generosity and even some empathy – if reluctantly – with some of the most ordinary, and even the crudest materials of contemporary society.
In fact, some objects and referents which find their way into this fundamentally sculptural work reveal a penchant for a kind of national pride. The France it features includes mantelpiece trinkets, floral-patterned couch covers, Gallic rock legend Johnny Hallyday, paid holidays, Edith Piaf, or the Peugeot 103 SP, an early 1980s sports moped – without irony, but without complacency, either. Rather, the intention is one of de-realization and tragedy. The work involves a tourist trip in popular and domestic territory, not on pleasant secondary roads, but on slippery, dangerous diversions that follow the ravine and along which public lighting suddenly goes off. A territory where skidding, crashing into a tree, or burning the car at the bottom of an embankment are always close possibilities. Similarly, while the work often evokes parties, it often focuses on the tail end, when people take a fight out on the parking lot, rather than on the preparations or the acme. The early signs of a hangover. The hour when people go straight to beer bottles rather than popping out champagne corks. Bottlenecks may slash when broken, but on the surface the party goes on. Wild time. Thank God it’s Saturday. Thank God it’s Sunday.
No need to panic though: with Ardouvin, everything is visibly fake. Trash, junk, cheap imitations. However, all of this remains very « conductive, » emotionally speaking. His work thereby engages in a reflection in action on our relation to the real, our desiring, semi-conscious tensions towards illusion, fantasy, no matter the context, no matter the cheapness of the objects used and the coarseness of the tricks involved. A light bulb for the sun, a mirror for the water, and some corrugated iron for the wavelets washing ashore. You’d think you’re dreaming! Well, you are. Ordinary magic, improbable trompe-l’oeils, and conjuring tricks with cheap trinkets. In fact, magic is not limited to flocks of doves flying out of a hat: it is also about getting spoons to twist. Ardouvin, a liar? Through his teeth: a low-tech disruption of perception, a suburban fantastic, a shopping-mall version of a hall of mirrors or of a carrousel, with home and garden catalogs as its mystical book of magic spells. At Toys’R’US, ask for Aunt Sally kits.
Pierre Ardouvin thus gauges our tendency to keep believing – as children do – that electric fireflies are fairies and that monsters lie hidden in closets. Subtly betting on our incredulity against our abandon to sensation, he turns a fur coat back into an animal, transforms green clothes on a hat stand into an exotic palm tree. This fantastic universe is based on pareidolia, the ability of our mind to summon up extraordinary visions, including at the very heart of our immediate everyday environment: knick-knacks, stains on the walls, clouds. These mental projections can border on uneasiness, and even psychosis. The artist’s recent works, presented at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, reinforce this inclination towards the ordinary fantastic. It is as though the Gremlins, Hansel and Gretel, and the Blob had a meeting on a parking lot stuck between The Garden Store, Home Depot, and Midas. The « Thing, » a black, soft rubbery bubble which appears to breathe slowly, pertains to a strand of minimal art that may be described as « organic-pneumatic, » grotesque and indecent – unless it is a giant pillow designed for nightmares. Further on, a fake-wood fence with fairy lights and fake plants announces « The End of the World. » The eschatological version of a festoon, this ominous sign sheds light on the deadly counterpart of popular celebrations. It conjures images of the stuffed Santa Claus figures that may be seen hanging from the gutters where they have been forgotten at the beginning of every year, or of short-circuits caused by Christmas lights that send suburban houses up in flames. Christmas in festoon, Easter in the emergency room. In the last part of the exhibition, polystyrene mobiles vaguely look like ghostly faces hanging from the ceiling, the unpolished by-products of a fairy tale gone wrong.
For sure, there is also laundry hanging from the windows, but it doesn’t really look like the south.
Guillaume Desange
