Bruno Peinado — The Times They Are A Changing — Loevenbruck Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: December 2, 2016 → February 4, 2017

“The Times They Are A Changing” is of course a famous song by Bob Dylan. Here the words also signal a simple fact: the artist is returning to the gallery setting after a deliberate break in his sequence of exhibitions. That hiatus allowed him to spend more time in the studio, exploring and experimenting, but also to make work built on exchanging and sharing with his entourage, a community of elective affinities comprising intimates, friends and students. Finally, “The Times They Are A Changing” also stands for a project, that of opening up frontiers and categories, practices and fields that are thought of as heterogeneous, and thus confronting the rigidity and identity reflexes of the present time. Peinado brings together high and low cultures, the playful and the serious, the personal and the collective. This is a way of displacing our value systems and ways of thinking, or reorganising them within an inclusive logic in which possibilities cohabit. In short, this is a “gentle revolution” based on play, transmission, the joy of the creative act and the pleasure of living and acting together.

Vue de l’exposition « The Times They Are A Changing », Bruno Peinado, Galerie Loevenbruck, 2016 Photo © Fabrice Gousset

Pale pink, that is the colour for this mixture of gentleness and engagement in the world and in art, covering the gallery walls. This programmatic hue is associated with childhood, with leisure and holidays, all moments that one expects to be carefree but that are also necessary. It is also programmatic because the colour is deemed unacceptable by the authoritarian, normative brand of modernism in which primary colours claim pre-eminence. It is a colour that therefore needs to be re-evaluated. Here it teams with grey, which Peinado uses frequently as a symbol of crossbreeding and Creolisation, of mixing and hybridising.

These pinks and greys are directly echoed by the pastel shades of the paintings shown here, which are a mix of references to Supports/Surfaces, Suprematism, Color Field painting, BMPT, the Californian minimalists and artists such as Shirley Jaffe, Richard Tuttle, Günther Förg and Nathalie Du Pasquier. These are experiments with pictorial abstraction, playing freely on its heritage and codes, but also on the way it has been appropriated in visual communications. This exercise in appropriation and synthesis, in which we can glimpse the history of forms and of their use and circulation, recurs at the centre of the gallery. The parallelepipeds here reference minimalist art while undermining its prerogatives: not only are they pastel-coloured, but they serve as bases for sculptures made by the artist with his two daughters, Simone (aged eight) and Joséphine (eleven). In these constructions and assemblages made with diverse objects we can recognise a nod to older works. The movement that runs through some of the elements in this structure is the same as the perpetual evolution and change at the heart of reality itself.