Pablo Pijnappel
06 Sep - 11 Oct 2008
PABLO PIJNAPPEL
"Homer"
Gallery Juliette Jongma is proud to present Homer, Pablo Pijnappel’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Pijnappel is currently on a Fonds BKVB residency in Paris, at Atelier Holsboer. Since his last exhibition at the gallery, Hotel Rio in 2006, he has exhibited widely in Europe, including solo shows at the Whitechapel, London (2007) and the Kadist Foundation, Paris (2008). Earlier this year, Pijnappel was awarded the prestigious Charlotte Köhlerprijs for the Visual Arts.
In Homer, a three-screen slide installation with a voice-over soundtrack, Pablo Pijnappel reinvents himself as a storyteller. Narrative structures have indeed been the main focus in his oeuvre from his first work (1921-1977 1979-) onwards. By using methods of cinematic deconstruction and collage, and the superimposition of text and image in a number of different ways, the artist always tells one more or less conclusive story – typically about someone who is very close to him.
For his most recent work, Pijnappel visited his close friend Kevin Co, a native New Yorker of Philippine descent who decided to move to the fringes of American society, winding up in Homer, a small fisherman’s village in Alaska. For those familiar with Pijnappel’s earlier works, the profile of Co aligns effortlessly with that of his earlier protagonists: they are all creative eccentrics, who are struggling with the numbing chokehold of contemporary society, and are usually trying to come to terms with some kind of cultural dislocation.
Like Felicitas (2005), this new work is a three-screen slide installation, in which a story is told via voice-over alongside a sequence of images. The artist subtly toys with the conventions of his essentially cinematic approach to using slides: while the narrative is a fairly conventional linear one (based on both Co’s ‘real’ biography and Pijnappel’s own ‘fictional’ memories, and describing a romantic away-from-civilisation road trip), the connection between narrative and image is complicated by the use of repetition, stasis, and (non-)simultaneity in the slide projection’s choreography. This way, Pijnappel expands and shrinks narrative space by breaking up the spectator’s gaze, making it shift between the three (sometimes two, or just one, or none) slide projections.
Homer is Pijnappel’s first piece that combines slide projections and a voice-over, which is placidly recorded by the ‘hero’, Kevin Co. At the same time, it is the first work in which the artist breaks free from his own cultural and familial references. Still, the central character remains a proxy through which Pijnappel is able to weave his idiosyncratic fabric of first and third-person narrative, ‘found’ and self made imagery, pop-cultural and cinematographic references (Sean Penn’s recent ‘Into the Wild’ echoes, for example), and existentialist quests.
"Homer"
Gallery Juliette Jongma is proud to present Homer, Pablo Pijnappel’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Pijnappel is currently on a Fonds BKVB residency in Paris, at Atelier Holsboer. Since his last exhibition at the gallery, Hotel Rio in 2006, he has exhibited widely in Europe, including solo shows at the Whitechapel, London (2007) and the Kadist Foundation, Paris (2008). Earlier this year, Pijnappel was awarded the prestigious Charlotte Köhlerprijs for the Visual Arts.
In Homer, a three-screen slide installation with a voice-over soundtrack, Pablo Pijnappel reinvents himself as a storyteller. Narrative structures have indeed been the main focus in his oeuvre from his first work (1921-1977 1979-) onwards. By using methods of cinematic deconstruction and collage, and the superimposition of text and image in a number of different ways, the artist always tells one more or less conclusive story – typically about someone who is very close to him.
For his most recent work, Pijnappel visited his close friend Kevin Co, a native New Yorker of Philippine descent who decided to move to the fringes of American society, winding up in Homer, a small fisherman’s village in Alaska. For those familiar with Pijnappel’s earlier works, the profile of Co aligns effortlessly with that of his earlier protagonists: they are all creative eccentrics, who are struggling with the numbing chokehold of contemporary society, and are usually trying to come to terms with some kind of cultural dislocation.
Like Felicitas (2005), this new work is a three-screen slide installation, in which a story is told via voice-over alongside a sequence of images. The artist subtly toys with the conventions of his essentially cinematic approach to using slides: while the narrative is a fairly conventional linear one (based on both Co’s ‘real’ biography and Pijnappel’s own ‘fictional’ memories, and describing a romantic away-from-civilisation road trip), the connection between narrative and image is complicated by the use of repetition, stasis, and (non-)simultaneity in the slide projection’s choreography. This way, Pijnappel expands and shrinks narrative space by breaking up the spectator’s gaze, making it shift between the three (sometimes two, or just one, or none) slide projections.
Homer is Pijnappel’s first piece that combines slide projections and a voice-over, which is placidly recorded by the ‘hero’, Kevin Co. At the same time, it is the first work in which the artist breaks free from his own cultural and familial references. Still, the central character remains a proxy through which Pijnappel is able to weave his idiosyncratic fabric of first and third-person narrative, ‘found’ and self made imagery, pop-cultural and cinematographic references (Sean Penn’s recent ‘Into the Wild’ echoes, for example), and existentialist quests.