‘A Recital of True Events’, Philippe Parreno’s fifth solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias, London, offers fragmentary glimpses of potential futures via a new series of drawings and paintings on paper...
‘A Recital of True Events’, Philippe Parreno’s fifth solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias, London, offers fragmentary glimpses of potential futures via a new series of drawings and paintings on paper that serve as storyboards for dormant films, comic books or scenarios awaiting actualisation.
Over the past thirty years, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a coherent “object” rather than as a collection of individual works. To this end, he conceives his shows as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. Drawing has remained an integral process throughout his career and in the development of the film and installation works for which he is best known, including Anywhere out of the World (2009–17) and C.H.Z (2011).
This new series of intimate and personal works on paper, titled ‘100 Questions, 50 Lies (A Recital of True Events)’, forefronts this lesser seen yet essential aspect of his conceptual practice. Akin to Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘The Book’ (1957) – the poet’s posthumously published collection of fragmentary notes, diagrams and mathematical calculations for the printing and recital of a total text whose exact purpose remains obscure – Parreno’s new series prophesies the emergence of narratives that have always existed in the realm of potentiality, but whose realisation demands the invention of an origin.
While the routine world can be anticipated as a series of potential states unfolding from known premises, the extraordinary emerges from the undefined abyss. Like spectral vibrations seeking a collective medium to form a language that can chronicle the genesis of a new cosmogony, Parreno’s works point towards a constellation of prospective plotlines poised for enactment.
In '100 Questions, 50 Lies (A Recital of True Events)', drawings are presented in arrangements of pairs or groups of three, executed variously in ink, pigment and oil. Meticulously detailed, deep, inky hues abound as insects swarm, clouds gather and eerie forms sway and teeter. Comparing drawing to writing, Parreno here substitutes grammar with aspects of image that together form an almost formal language conceived in the manner of a storyboard. A grasping hand punches through an ominous sky; subterranean tunnels are explored by amorphous, shadowy shapes; a solitary figure is spotlit in a barren landscape.
Viewers are invited to decipher the signs written on Parreno’s open book, to decode the message that announces both the imminent event and a parallel history to our ongoing global catastrophe. The artist encourages us to consider how might we harness our power to birth fictions, to create space-time crystals that shimmer like waves in an ocean of emerging and vanishing worlds? What narratives will unfold? Will our voice(s) resonate?