Didier Trenet — Championne de descente — Claudine Papillon Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 7 → February 25, 2012

You’ll enter this new exhibition by Didier Trenet in a winner’s mood. The programmatic title of this selection of works suggests a content with the perfect balance: 50% exploit, 50% ridiculous, in the 18th century sense of this word. Didier Trenet’s work is born splendid, and spreads on many supports the unchaste mating of a shameless technical mastery with the art of jokes : “ What is this exhibition gathering? Pomp, indeed… spirits, out of doubt… readings, opportunely ” he confesses.

Without totally spoiling Didier Trenet’s playful ways, we can say that he devotes himself to meticulous though wholly riotous work, and uses the exercice de style both as a sincere tribute to his precedors, as a direct criticism of self-conceit. Since this foible is common to all ages, Didier Trenet’s manner isn’t a backward-looking exercise, which would only make fun of present time. On the contrary, it draws from established forms the various elements of a very contemporary social study.

The patterns you’ll recognize step by step are as many mentions of damaged values set down in our habits: figures of authority dethroned by the ordinary, majesty eroded by disuse, honours in faded wash.

And, last but not least, if all these slogans, school books full of up and downstrokes and the borrowings to iconographic culture, which are dead forms, are given back to life here, is to party, laughing aloud in the Rabelais manner, the endless pleasures of flesh and fare.

Didier TRENET — born in 1965 in Trambly, where he lives and works. Graduated from the art school Villa Arson in Nicehe has been a host of Villa Medicis in Rome in 1997.

Currently, he is partecipating to the exhibition Décor et Installation, at Galerie des Gobelins, Mobilier National.