Bruno Pélassy — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 16 → March 22, 2015

The Crédac, with the able assistance of Marie Canet, Air de Paris and Pélassy’s family, is proud to present a monographic show devoted to the French artist Bruno Pélassy.

Following studies in textile and jewelry design, Pélassy began his art career in the early 1990s, a period marked by the trauma of AIDS. Touched by this scourge very early on, the artist explored and developed an ambivalent poetics of life and death through the use of metaphors and figures embodied in works of art. It was a play of multiple techniques that suggest in a sensitive, formal way both a personal and political experience. Pélassy borrowed his processes, techniques for shaping his work, and materials from haute couture. Sketches rub shoulders with his meticulous working of glass and crystal, jewelry and reliquary design imbued with a knocked-together baroque esthetic. If his work is dark in many ways, it is also sensitive, clear-sighted, romantic and radiant.

Through its conjuring up of memory, the Crédac exhibition has taken on a retrospective aspect, and indeed its aim is to bring back into the spotlight this singular body of work. The show offers visitors the chance to discover a corpus made up of emblematic series like “Créatures,” featuring organisms moving
around inside aquariums, adorned with strips of silk and lace, and wheeling in a graceful, volatile waltz; or “Bestioles” (Bugs), which form an incomplete bestiary of mechanical divas showing off in elaborate outfits that blend precious materials with tacky, cheap elements. The grace that attends this finery is never a far cry from a form of economic insecurity, even an ineluctable deterioration that haunts the portraits done in wax or pencil depicting characters in the process of decomposing or disappearing (We gonna have a good time, 1994-1995). Viewed as an artwork-manifesto, Pélassy’s 1995 video Sans titre, Sang titre, Cent titres (the title is a series of homonym puns on the word “untitled”) features a montage of television excerpts recorded on VHS, whose magnetic tape is doomed to blur and dim as it is read repeatedly over time, slowly damaging the image until it disappears altogether.

Realized with the support of the artist’s family, the project brings together several art venues, Crédac, Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain in Brest (7 February — 2 May 2015), the Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon in Sète (autumn 2015) and Mamco (Musée d’art moderne et
contemporain) in Geneva (February 2016), for a series of exhibitions devoted to Bruno Pélassy and his work.

A book is jointly published by éditions Dilecta, Les Amis de Bruno Pélassy, Crédac, Passerelle, Le Crac, Mamco and Air de Paris.

Bruno Pélassy
Text: Marie Canet — Graphic design: Fanette Mellier
French / English — 20 €