Alexandre Perigot – You Spin, You Spin, You Spin…, 2007
You spin you spin you spin you spin you spin…
Do not stop making pictures…
When image becomes communication, propaganda and standardisation, art can make the difference… At least, there are artists who will try their hand.
Alexandre Perigot creates his pieces by getting down to a delicate and hazardous task: entangling the threads of representation to clear the grime from the aesthetic and political engagement of art. His entire oeuvre constitutes a vast mine clearance operation in the established wisdom concerning images and artists. His pieces create a sense of unease: light and superficial form or challenging conceptualism? Seduction or critical distance? Masterly stagecraft or questioning of spectacle? The questioning in his work may irritate, but it has the merit of defusing the discourse of authority and imposed certainties.
His artistic enterprise has also been to develop an oeuvre in a permanent state of becoming, in other words to generate unstable installations for which the power of the truth of the image is never sufficient. Alexandre Perigot produces blocks of images in ceaseless proliferation through aggregation, friction, combination, paradox, sequencing, repetition, division, dissonance, rotation, shrinkage, multiplication, spinning, extension…
For example, Elvis House (2005) has materialised as large as life in several cities around the world – Chiang Mai, Glasgow, Lisbon, Marseille, Paris, Riga… – in a vast skeleton of steel or bamboo, stripping the flesh from the walls which enclosed the King’s life there, whilst infiltrating into it new geopolitical takes on the contemporary history of rock and the performing arts.
In a different way, Funkypipe (2007) sets off a belly dance performed by bookcases and steel pipes, structures which are themselves (dis)located in front of a tapestry reproducing a popular painting of a romantic sunset over an oilfield in Bakou.