07 Nov 2008

Emilie Pitoiset - Animals can't laugh at x Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain

Emilie Pitoiset

Animals can't laugh

8 November – 7 December 2008, Project Room
Opening on Saturday 8 November at 11 a.m.

With a distinct predilection for fragile equilibriums, defacings or unnatural postures and movements (particularly as concerns animals), Emilie Pitoiset reconstitutes or invents situations replete with cruelty, which viewers cannot fully grasp through plain responses of compassion or shock.

With their kinship to minimal and hyperrealist art, Pitoiset's installations, taxidermic objects, naive drawings, and projections deal with physical constraints as in dance, ballet, or animal training.

Pitoiset's works, whose narrative constructions oscillate between documentary practice and pure invention, confront viewers with their own perceptive faculties and their necessary limitations, such as the obsessive desire to distinguish truth from illusion. In doing so, they create openings toward fiction that come into play at the very moment in which the viewers' perception is hampered by doubt.

While the somewhat embarrassing literalness of the work's presentation thwarts a potentially violent and emotional reaction (whether through shock or banality), no less disquieting doubts as to their veracity become more acute.

This allows viewers to apprehend the distressing notion of anti-tragical beauty, which in Pitoiset's installations remains without effective resolve. Behind the veil of these uncertainties – which cannot be lifted if the work's meaning is to be preserved –, the elements of our affective construction of reality reveal themselves through a thrilling confrontation without the slightest hint of possible catharsis.

Watch out for the gaps...

Curator: Marc Clement


With the kind support of Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles d'Ile de France.