Une souris verte
qui ne court plus
du tout dans l'herbe
Pierre Petit
Curated by Isabelle de Maison Rouge
Exhibition from February 7 to March 24, 2023
Origin of the rebus
During my various trips abroad and particularly in China, few people spoke English and even less French. Also to express myself, I systematically used drawing. The drawing, which became an image, replaced words and made language barriers disappear, thus a universal language substituted for the language of the country. Following this experience, when I create my travel diaries I take written notes but I notice that during this action the images replace the words, so I create the drawing. There is no rupture, the story continues.
Pierre Petit
Today after yesterday
In my work, the most diverse memories mingle, the authentic with the pleasant, the imaginary with the real. It is a journey where the conscious navigates with the unconscious to weave daily life in cross-stitch. Stop, my son tells me, I no longer speak, I translate. In fact I speak as I work and I work as I speak, without counting, in a luxuriance of activity. The trash cans that yawn in the midday sun are full of good things to pick for those who know, as Queneau writes in Courir les rues, make up my daily life. Comfortable memories live with detestable memories to form a universe where the rules confuse reason. In my work, I do not engage in an intellectual exercise; it is a game of image association, a telescoping of ideas that destroys all censorship to highlight and invest the dream. A waking dream where desires are fulfilled, I invent a world where the impossible becomes possible thus weaving the web of my work, this is how the narrative develops. I scatter the stories, I weave a dense network where one distinguishes the narrative, the events of no apparent importance, what seems to be worth nothing unfolds to shape a poetic space. Like the poet, I look at the world with a magnifying glass, giving it perspective and adventure. I collect the most important moments of this world, I assemble them until the moment when the objective universe becomes poetry. The identifiable becomes an enigma; this enigma is constituted by the choice of forms, materials, objects, technique and codes, but it resists conventional analysis. This work is conducted like a game, but not a free game, I maintain the gap between reality and dream, the reasonable and the unreasonable. The systems oppose each other to build a flexible poetry that moves me away from confinement and leads me to the next journey.a
Pierre Petit
Visual artist close to the fluxus movement, Pierre Petit places his approach in the dialogue between objects. Since the eighties his work is based on objects resulting from globalization, of which he examines the effect of dispersion and anonymity, he talks about this subject of Object globe. This object serves as a medium for making symbolic, sometimes ironic, often political narratives. They get tangled and bounce between them. As the spectator is forced to zap from one image to another, he will travel to a world of which he becomes the storyteller, in turn inventing stories. By diverting objects and signs that belong to the collective memory, using them to rethink, explore History, that of human beings and art history, Pierre Petit offers us a path towards a recomposed memory, which captures the representations of modernity from their multiplicity.