Hans Ulrich Obrist, co-editor of the Cahiers d'Art revue and a co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, is the curator of this exhibition. This new collaboration between the artist and the curator is part of a process that has united these two unique figures in the world of contemporary art for many years.
"When I try to summarize and understand all the different aspects, problems, ideas or insights that characterize the work of Philippe Parreno, I realize that the only thing I am really sure of is that his thought and work cannot be summarized. They somehow form a pure resistance to the tentative."
Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2002
The series presented here - CHZ, Fireflies, Marilyn: In preparation of a Biometric Portrait - all date from 2011 and 2012 and are recent projects, as is the practice of drawing for the artist. Parreno compares drawing to writing. The grammar is substituted for him with aspects of image, which together form an almost formal language, and the different series are conceived in the manner of a storyboard.
Speaking to the Penguins
The photographs presented in this exhibition are the result of an exercise during which Philippe Parreno conversed with a colony of penguins at night on a beach in Patagonia. The penguin is an animal that is never encountered alone, but rather always in a group. Inspired by "After Affect58", a series of texts published in the Italian magazine Domus regarding the relationship of man to nature and the urban landscape, Philippe Parreno decided to engage the subject through language rather than only through visual depiction. One objective of this series was to convey the profound experience of achieving direct contact with a community of animals.
Philippe Parreno has curated a second exhibition to be shown at 15 rue du Dragon, which includes a dozen master drawings (Francisco de Goya, Wassily Kandinsky, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Case, Liam Gillick , Matthew Barney, Koo Jeong-A and John Cage). "These are the drawings I was thinking of while working on the CHZ series. For me, these are drawings where the memories of the drawings are truly linked to writing."
