Pierre Joseph — Entretiens sur l’art — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Lecture — Slash Paris

Past: Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 7 PM

Pierre Joseph is one of the major artists of the generation that appeared in the early 1990s, alongside Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Bernard Joisten and Philippe Parreno, artists whose work was the foundation for the development of Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics. Inspired by video games and the idea of virtual reality, Pierre Joseph’s Personnages (à réactiver)—which quickly became famous after they were invented in 1991—represent a way of conceiving an exhibition as a space to inhabit or a fiction experienced in real time.

An “artists’ artist”, as Pierre Huyghe calls him, Pierre Joseph is an experimenter who “never recreates the same thing twice”, and is “more interested in producing ‘situations’ than objects” (Éric Troncy). Reminiscent of the protocols of conceptual art as well as certain surrealist experiments, Pierre Joseph produces playful and cognitive situations, such as his systems of learning (the Japanese language) or memorization: from memory he reproduced the Paris metro map (Mon Plan du Plan de Métro de Paris) and his paths through Tokyo. And he got students to reproduce drawings of the male and female genital organs (L’Atlas, images restaurées).

His system-works reveal and involve the production and representation modalities of a generic, technological or imaginary reality. His recent series of photographs show artificial landscapes, whether it be his horizonless wheat fields produced by the agri-food industry (Hypernormandie) or his forests frozen in the fantasy of an eternal Maintenant [Now]. The hyper-reality borders on abstraction. The artist explores “the real”, in other words, “that which is given and standardized by representation”, and he leads us, the viewers, to a ridge from which he contemplate a dual, infinite reality that he invites us to reconstruct.

We will therefore explore a body of work, that of Pierre Joseph in his company, revisiting it from its edges, from the perspective of what inspires and fuels the artist. We will survey the broader field of a practice, getting close to the invisible part of the work.

The artist is exhibiting his latest project #PierreJosephRedouté at his gallery Air de Paris from January 20 to March 10, 2018.