Les Modules / Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent — Hervé Coqueret — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: July 8 → September 4, 2011

Le cercle

Hervé Coqueret, artist and film-maker, looks at reality through the filter of cinema. His attractive and appealing artistic work offers a romantic vision of the links that are formed between fiction and reality. Fascinated by cinema and images, the artist constantly manipulates, analyzes and deconstructs them, then goes on to recompose new ones. Each of these creations then conjures up a setting, a background for a possible story. Although the works are all autonomous, putting them together inside the exhibition space inevitably leads to the creation of associations.

The exhibition, entitled “Le cercle”, a reference to the universal form of the circle and its social and family resonances, invites the viewer to enter a zone. Hervé Coqueret makes a collection of works whose shared features could be assemblage, construction and superimposition. Thus La fin, a photograph of a sunset formed of 390 sheets of A4 paper, is presented on a wall lined with aluminum. The gesture resulting from a simple procedure engenders an emphasis on this phenomenon that sees itself both as a spectacle and an image. Meanwhile the black and white picture of a dilapidated modern house on the adjoining wall conjures up a more dramatic modern landscape. The sheets of paper sewn one to another let us see a large-format image. What do the walls of this domestic space the visitor could hypothetically enter — a private, family world — conceal? The sculpture made from video cassettes taken from the artist’s personal collection contains many different narrative patterns, but only the titles and images on the sleeves provide material for mental projection. Cinema constantly produces new references, a fictional constellation that feeds the artist’s desire for cinema insatiably and ad infinitum.