Nicolas Pinier defends a poetic approach to reality: anchored in everyday life, his practice is based on meeting people, the possibility of taking a step aside, the staging of oneself and others. Through performance, video and photography, he creates situations that allow fiction to infiltrate reality.
The establishment of a link (to others, to the territory), whether close or distant, comes back as a strong motivation in the artist’s practice. For three weeks, he became a traveller on his street for the perimeter of his adventure: the work born from this experimentation takes the form of a composite narrative, drawings and texts, press articles, audio and video clips, and clothing trophies, all objects that trace this journey.
All these projects are also rooted in the writing of a precise script, which often tests the artist’s body. In the photographic series created during the Centre Pompidou-Metz construction site, Nicolas Pinier staged himself through transvestism and grimage.
He will draw his iconography from some masterpieces of the history of modern art. Thus, Le Touriste, after Duane Hansen’s Tourist II (1970) proudly stands on the square in front of the centre under construction. The image, which brings together two levels of reality, invites us to shift our gaze and bring art into life.
Humour, fantasy and absurdity are part of Nicolas Pinier’s vocabulary. His universe also borrows from the tale, which brings out the marvelous through the ruptures of scale, the abyss and the magical transports. Taking your garden on a trip with a caravan seems plausible: in the installation Jardin de voyage, he circulates flowers on a balcony, a removable vegetable garden and an emergency lawn to meet new territories, joining the great family of fervent defenders of a magical realism.
