Bruno Peinado
Low Revolutions
"At first sight, Bruno Peinado's exhibitions look like vast arenas of chaos, through wich visitors are invited to make their way, with neither indications nor semaphores to guide them. Drawings, wall paintings, objects on pedestals, other objects set on the ground, neon lights, mannequins, graffiti, posters and videos…
A sprawling and proliferating universe, from which any notion of hierarchy, any imposition of meaning or direction has been banished. An apology for the discontinuous, the exploded, the fragmentary, Peinado's work is as utterly opposed to the unity of time and place as it is to the unity of meaning and thought.
In keeping with the paradoxical logic of diversity and up-rootedness, the artist draws upon uncertainty, upon a refusal of everything systematic, a rejection of authenticity and transparency. In its place, he proposes - in the wake of West-Indian writer Edouard Glissant - a "poetics of chaos", always in motion, perpetually unfinished.
Peinado's practice stems, to some degree, from cartography : to draw a territory is already to appropriate it for oneself ; but to draw it backwards is to set it into play in directions other than that imposed by the dominant culture.The handmade, the approximate, the drips of paint are all ways of breaking free from models, and of flowing different vanishing lines. By subjecting the signs and images which are our daily bread to modifications and small shifts. Peinado adds supplementary levels of interpretation even as he slightly alters the meaning, and ensures that these signs - neither quite " other " nor quite the " same " - are left disjointed, uncodable and unclassable.
A form of silent struggle against the generalized standardization affecting culture, society and the economy, this poetics of chaos is also a way of delegitimizating everything, of escaping the logic of genesis and founding myths, creators of the absolute, in an attempt to elude the systemic modes of thinking and schemes of nomination which organize the world ; where detour and disproportion are mustered as principles of resistance."
(Elisabeth Wetterwald)
MAC - Galeries contemporaines des Musées de Marseille
June 29 - September 30, 2001
Excerpts from the text published in NU, vol.III, n°6/01
(Translated from French by Stephen Wright)
