Paul Pouvreau — Le magazine des jours — CPIF — Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 19 → April 14, 2019

Paul Pouvreau — CPIF, Pontault-Combault Comme nous retournons sur les traces de nos films favoris et de nos artistes fétiches, les images sont autant de refuges possibles ... 2 - Bien Critique

Ten years after his participation in the Île de Morel group exhibition, Paul Pouvreau is the subject of a monographic show at the CPIF.

This exhibition will endeavour to explore the oeuvre of one of the most exciting artists of his generation, combining old images with more recent ones especially produced for the event.

Paul Pouvreau, Pique-nique aux champs, 2015 Dessin Paul Pouvreau

Paul Pouvreau uses everyday materials, household utensils, dust, cardboard packaging, plastic bags and advertising posters to construct poetic spaces and moments in time. He creates incidents that stand out in a daily life made up of dreary signs by illuminating it with meaning and little visual pleasures.

Part of his work, which places architectural, sculptural, performance-related, graphical and photographical gestures on an equal footing, could be considered burlesque. The latter is a genre that makes use of catastrophes and détournement, blurring the hierarchy of values in order to challenge the established order. In this form of comedy, a man wrestles with elements — generated here by the consumer ideal — in a profusion of signs like so much “visual detritus”¹.

“The enchanting of the trivial was what Pop was all about, followed by the Conceptual transformation of consumer items into the compulsive fetishisation of series, collections, classification and so on. Cutting free of these legacies, Pouvreau takes pleasure in creating new bearings in the twilight of the commodity.” wrote Michel Poivert.²

Paul Pouvreau, Passé simple, 2014 Photographie — 62 × 84 cm Paul Pouvreau

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Paul Pouvreau was born in 1956 in Aulnay-sous-Bois (in the suburbs of Paris) and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bourges (France). His photos have been the subject of numerous exhibitions both in France and abroad and are part of various public and private collections. He has been teaching at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles since 2010.

¹ Antonia Birnbaum, in Le Monde à plat, Éditions Loco, 2017.

² Michel Poivert, in Seasonal variations, Édition Galerie municipale Jean Collet, 2016.