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Pierrick Sorin

  • visuel-pierricksorin

    © Galerie Eva Hober

In the workshop already inhabited by scenographic projects for la Scala, Milan, and the National Opera of Taiwan, the mess is proportional to the amount of activities carried out by Pierrick Sorin. He is a one-man band who is all at once a cameraman, a decorator, an actor and an editor… One morning, as he was making room on his desk to see things more clearly, he wound up a computer cable in a coloured glass without giving it much thought. The distorted aspect it took once inside the glass directed his attention: “The association glass-cable, meant to be practical, created a sort of ready-made, the artistic validity of which was admittedly as dubious as the efficiency of its practical function. But something did attract my attention there, and it was the fact that a person in this case me, could make such a big thing of a gesture and a visual construction that were pretty trivial compared with more serious issues in the world.1”

This aesthetic « revelation » is the starting point of his installation at the Eva Hober Gallery. To share his discovery, Pierrick Sorin slips into the skin of a professor, “B&Q meets Salvador Dali 2”. He takes on the “bargain” aspect from the former, providing the visitor with precious advice to put away their cables by winding them up neatly, and by filing them according to type, in different coloured glasses. From Salvador Dali, he takes on that “critical paranoia” that consists in seeing in something the possible shape of another, thanks to an acute, almost pathologic attention given to detail. The glasses and cables are displayed on rotating trays that spin under the watchful eye of a surveillance camera, so that nothing escapes Professor Sorin.

The winding up of the cables and their carefully orchestrated rotation create a redundancy of concentric movements that are reminiscent of the video-director’s self-filming, made in the 80s. Zooming on detail, and cuttings of chain actions were the focus of the viewers’ attention on clumsy Sorin’s failures: a bowl of cocoa spilled on work sketches, the fruitless search of a set of lost keys... From this point of view, the scenario based on a creative protocol of filing would be the inverted reflection of Freudian slips. The figure of a professor, who is the creator of an ingenious control system, adds to the figure of the artist, victim of accidents. But the trick is not that simple... The magnifying eye of a camera films the rotation of the glasses in real-time when it is supposed to back up the filing method that the professor exposes. Projected on the walls of the gallery, the cables are distorted under the combined influence of the movement and the distortion of the glass, thus creating an hypnotic landscape of tangled up threads. The discrepancy between the wisely pragmatic words of the professor, and their anarchic visual illustration is ridiculous. Swallowed up in the middle of a vast optical system, Professor Sorin is overwhelmed by the future of a device of which he is losing control.

While brilliantly manipulating the optical effects and illusions, Pierrick Sorin excels in mind games of inversions. His splitting in the self-filming, and the bodydoubles he uses are as many ambiguous self-portraits: an illusionist, an ectoplasmic character in his optical theatres, or the creator of strange activities that, for want of entering the range of action signposted by the Homo faber, could very well resemble art, where from exactly, does Pierrick Sorin speak to us? A radical doubt on the status of the artist, and their claim to create, nourish this constant moving. While he is not an accomplished B&Q, he is the creator of a monumental fresco of cables, so could Professor Sorin be a painter without being aware of it?

1 Words by Pierrick Sorin.
2 Pierrick Sorin is informing that the description of his character was written during the creation of the work and might not conform to the final result

Press release for Eva Hober Gallery, 2010.