Peter Buggenhout — Contes Invertébrés — Laurent Godin Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 14 → June 25, 2011

An important topic in the work of Peter Buggenhout is his use of industrial and organic waste to make art.

In the late 1990s, the artist launched into a sculptural practice that is anything but normative. His approach hinges on the materials: dust, horse hair, detritus, blood, and cow stomachs and intestines, that is to say, abject materials which set in motion a constant ambivalence between attraction and repulsion.

These works, whose materials produce an indeterminate and enigmatic form, are related the formless, which, according to Georges Bataille, “is not only an adjective having a given meaning but a term that serves to bring things down in the world.” Peter Buggenhout plays on this declassing so that his work circumvents categorization. He materializes waste to the point of giving it a form before subjecting it to a series of operations that lead to formlessness.

[…]

In this way, he seeks to make sculptures that are concerned with what they are and nothing else. Their autonomy comes precisely from his choice of materials, which, once removed from their original context, lose their form and function because they have been declassed.

Looking at these works, it is difficult to tell how old they are. They do not belong to any time frame, yet they seem paradoxically close to archeological finds from the past or future, pointing to a time that will surpass us.

For his first solo show at Laurent Godin gallery in Paris, Peter Buggenhout chose to bring together three aspects of his work. His selection of recent works present new formal possibilities (more ethereal, in suspension), all the while maintaining the specificities of his materials (dust, blood, horse hair, cow stomach, etc.). Here, the artist clearly continues to push to an extreme his uncategorizable aesthetic choices, which pay no heed to the trends of the day and never give in to the temptation of the facile, the seductive, and the accessible.