Artist: Pierre-Olivier Arnaud

Art : Concept presents Pierre-Olivier Arnaud’s fifth solo exhibition.

By inviting us to politicize our gaze and the medium of photography, Pierre-Olivier Arnaud’s work offers a reflection on images and their modes of production, dissemination, and consumption. His images stem from a practice of collecting photographs, particularly of advertising imagery found in magazines or public spaces. As witnesses to a society’s imagination and economy, these images—perhaps more than any others—question our desires and the intentions behind these representations.

Pierre-Olivier Arnaud does not consider these images as series but as sets—constellations that can be presented in different arrangements. The varied subjects and formats are homogenized through a grayscale treatment, a “machine gray” that establishes coherence. Light, grid, print dots, framing, and colorimetry divert our attention from the subject and confront us with the image itself. Stripped of their context, the images reveal their inherent formal characteristics: composition, material, texture...

The exhibition space becomes an environment in which to experience the presence and power of images. True to the artist’s established aesthetic language, a dozen prints—in the format of metro posters—are pasted directly onto the walls. Playing with repetition, displacement, rhythm disruption, and empty spaces, they blend into the exhibition space while introducing a fragment of the outside world.

Other images are displayed in transparent A4 sleeves, fixed to the wall with a piece of colored tape. In contrast to the immobility of the large posters, they suggest spontaneity and the possibility of alternative combinations. In a shift from image to object, they evoke a return to reality and materiality.

Oscillating between sublimation and desublimation, these new elements create a sense of uncertainty about the projections they offer. How can we rekindle desire, transform it, allow ourselves to be changed, and create a shared experience? The image becomes a prototype, a project in progress, a fantasy in a gray zone between the collapse of the modernist project and the promise of a future—a possible horizon “amidst this grayness.”

- Ida Simon-Raynaud
Proofreading: Ginger Clark