In 2010, Videospread will showcase the work of two French artists, and
will promote the activity of two Marseilles bases organisations by
presenting two shows of their own initiative.
To start this new-year, Videospread is pleased to present Pippo Lionni’s
solo show -Re-animation- composed of eight recent pieces: and practical,
linerunner, lovespaces, neo primitive, perpetuation, rape, urbanopolos
and think less do more. The programme will be launched in January 2010
and screened for one year.
Re-animation
Pippo Lionni has been showing his "Facts of Life" series since 1998.
Whatever the medium, a collection of small fluorescent booklets,
installations in art galleries, prints and animations, he operates a
shift in the use of pictograms, bringing them to life through a critical
satire of our social existence. By means of an unceasing narrative and
playful coming and going, his use of animation offers a new level of
comprehension. "I usually work on site specific installations modulating
the temporality of confrontation in a given context. I use animation as
a means to play with the duality between the abstract and figurative.
From a distance one perceives a visual dynamic of moving forms; when up
close, one deciphers the autonomous life cycle of the symbols, dependent
on random, combinational and organic algorithms. This time/distance
relation confers a new dimension to the "Facts of Life" series. With
animation, one always wonders, "what is next?" says Lionni.
What else can these pictograms reveal? As a universal and normalized
form of language, they land mark our daily life – to be perceived and
understood by all without ambiguity. Representing the power of symbolic
language, they are a schematic graphical representation, a stylized
figurative drawing, functioning like a written sign language, which
cannot be transcribed into oral language. Usually used in public
signage, they are an alternative to multilingual text to describe a
situation, to prescribe a particular behaviour or indicate potential
danger. These symbols are published in the "Journal Officiel" as
regulation. This visual language, which normally contributes to
pragmatic submissiveness, is suddenly disrupted and makes apparent “the
obvious” through carefully chosen stereotypes, and thus addresses
diversity and enigma. As a graphic and industrial Designer, Pippo Lionni
masters the tools and methods of communication in the framework of
commissioned projects. As an Artist, Lionni plays with these tools and
creates his body of work as a parallel universe, populated with signs
and shapes and articulated by a two layered grammar, which cleverly
takes us into his own repertoire of semiotics by a mirror effect.
Pippo Lionni scores a bull’s eye with the screening in Amsterdam, as his
work finds its way back to the general public. Beyond moving the
exhibition into a non-art context, the selection of Lionni’s 8
animations could well make everything tip-over. The Artist has his back
against the wall. Which of the two will take over, the graphic Designer
or the visual Arts Artist? Re-animation… to be re-animated is to be
between life and death, at the doors of the purgatory, asking for a
second chance, a second life. These animations are subject to
traditional commercial programming, to the randomness of passers-by, to
the uncertainty of life. If placed in the usual exhibition spaces of
Contemporary Art, the shift would happen naturally, but confronted to
public space, ambiguity shows its face… Finally! To the duality of his
nature of being both a visual Artist and a graphic Designer, echoes a
dialectic which confronts abstraction and figuration, macro and
microcosm, identity and otherness, innate and acquired, passivity and
activism, determinism and free will, commissioned and freely created
work... Following the example of Hegel for whom "something is living
insofar as it contains contradiction, which provides it with
self-movement", Lionni is somewhat provocative, using the opponent’s
weapons to destroy an undetermined, "thus perverted" thought generating
bomb. Operating as an anti-propaganda act at the heart of the city,
this Re-animation makes the political beat of his Art even stronger.
Whilst playing with the reversible aspect of images and the polysemy of
these "ready-made" codes, he calls for introspection, for an ode to
human condition and places himself as an Artist of truth –may it be
Hegelian-, in the form of a cerebral pirouette. Not so distant from
Street Art motivations and objectives, Pippo Lionni calls out to "Find
the truth that lies within our-selves!"
-Text by Sarah Carrière-Chardon-