Nantes (Loire-Atlantique). The work of Pierrick Sorin (born in 1960) was very fashionable at the turn of the 2000s. Caught up in collaborations with brands and with opera, the video artist and scenographer had nevertheless disappeared from the radar of contemporary art – to the point that in 2019, when the Centre Pompidou-Metz devoted an exhibition to the relationships between lyrical art and the visual arts, he was not included. In 2001, Pierrick Sorin nevertheless invested the ground floor of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain with a succession of videos using different technical processes. Among them, his “optical theaters” earned him a lot of success. Projected as a hologram, his miniature character, taking on all sorts of identities, alone or in multiple forms, endlessly replays often absurd sketches: balancing on a bar of soap, walking in a loop on a moving vinyl turntable, retaking the first steps on the Moon, singing a folk lament as a duet in a dollhouse setting, diving in an aquarium… So many comical situations playing on scale and optical illusion. He now explains that he thought he had invented this device in 1995, before realizing that it was already known. “I had observed a reflection phenomenon in a shop window and I reproduced it by superimposing a filmed image on a miniature real setting. In fact this trickery had existed since the 19th centurye century: it was used to make ghosts appear on stage.
These amusing little theatres constitute the bulk of what the Musée d’arts de Nantes has chosen to show in this exhibition which finally pays tribute to a local boy: Pierrick Sorin was born in Nantes in 1960, he studied there at the École des beaux-arts and he still lives there – he will also open his studio for the first time this summer with new creations as part of the Voyage à Nantes (from July 6 to September 8).
Three larger format devices are also highlighted. Painting and cleaning, or will at work (2024) thus welcomes the visitor upon entering. The artist appears face-on, as a window cleaner armed with a roller, apparently placed behind a window covered in soapy liquid that he is cleaning. Little by little, the traces of his intervention inscribe the contours of a drawing in the foam. A hollow composition appears, which he punctuates here and there with a touch of color, as if under the effect of a sudden inspiration. The comic effect accompanies the derisory aesthetic ambition of the character who, by taking himself for a painter, diverts an ordinary operation into a creative act. By passing itself off as a “live” performance, the video, actually projected on a translucent screen, contributes all the more to distancing the notion of creative approach and the aura of the artist. Everything is false.
A seriousness linked to the comic
In the middle of the route, the video installation The Man Who Lost His Keys (2017) mimics the codes of the black series and psychological cinema through close-ups on the tortured expression of his character, prey to a banal anguish filmed like an existential drama. Finally in the chapel of the Oratory, the installation The Mechanical Broom (2023) (made in homage to Fernand Léger’s 1924 film) juxtaposes filmed images and animated, makeshift objects. Two characters (Pierrick Sorin in two) perform a score in a video that appears to be synchronized with the soundtrack of this heterogeneous setting, but here again, nothing we think we see is true. It is obviously this way of doubting images that, beyond its burlesque and sometimes repetitive springs, makes Pierrick Sorin’s work current. But also the insane perfection of his meticulously arranged little theaters, where seriousness is inextricably linked to the comic impulse, fantasy governed by a manic precision.
One piece that the artist considers pivotal in his career is not included in the exhibition, which is regrettable. It is the film entitled This is all so cutepresented “off” at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. It shows a man dressed as a woman, in a short skirt, black stockings and stiletto heels. Getting on all fours on a table, he films himself from behind and projects the image of his fantasy (a pair of female buttocks) in front of his eyes. The viewer sees both the device and the self-voyeurism session. According to Pierrick Sorin, it anticipated the way in which “the video could promote a form of narcissistic perversity”. Pretty well seen.
Pierrick Sorin, The noisy soundmen2021, optical theatre, designed and produced by order of the Children’s Philharmonic.
© Pierrick Sorin
