07 October 2010

Pincemin

Saturday's visit to Ceret market (Céret in French but no accent in Catalan) also provided an opportunity to nip into one of our favorite art museums for an exhibition on an artist we had never come across but now are fans of: Jean-Pierre Pincemin, 1944-2005.

http://www.musee-ceret.com/mam/exposition.php?expo=141&statut=actuelle (the changing slide show on the right shows several of his works as they were displayed)

Pincemin was a dedicated Trotskyite who had worked on the Concorde engine assembly line at Renault before committing himself fulltime to art. Self-taught, he may have been an outsider, but was still très français in his theoretical and political rigor.

Photography wasn't allowed, so we have no pictures of the stunning first room, with huge unstretched canvases suspended from the walls. In fact, we have no photos of any paintings, so at the end I'll paste in some images found via google that are representative of Pincemin's oeuvres, though all of them weren't part of this exhibition.

When we got to the sculpture room, another visitor was snapping away, so we thought -- ah, perhaps it's permitted here. Wrong. Before being reprimanded, though, Michael had taken several photos of this sui generis work, weathered painted wood fastened with rusted wire. According to an article on an earlier NYC exhibition, this "bizarre neo-Constructivist sculpture ... [m]ade out of the leftovers of gutted slum buildings and lashed together with primitive wiring . . . looks dirty and dilapidated instead of utopian. There is a message in these materials and techniques: even the small sculptures would look awful on your marble coffee table." Proving once again what lousy art critics we are, Michael and I found the bleached wood/wire forms quite whimsical and uplifting.







Painting photos below provided c/o google images. One of the things you lose, unfortunately, is the amazing textural quality of the brushwork, especially in the Rothko-esque canvases.














No comments:

Post a Comment