Pierre Paulin

Rearranging My Wardrobe, Again—the first New York presentation of works by Pierre Paulin—is an assemblage of poetic transfers, a blurred atmosphere. The artist hides behind a system of apparitions, explorations in languages, and multiplicities of translations, articulated through poetry, film, books, and clothing.

Sampling and combining cultural signs in a variety of media, Paulin’s practice is centered around the notion of “look”: the terms refers to an assembly of “basics”—jeans, trench coats, t-shirts, hoodies, and shoes—that are recombined to produce a clothing style. Elements from a ready-to-wear aesthetics, always reflecting the artist’s wardrobe, are adopted as extracts of a language developed from a shared cultural history and wielded to create slight singularities; clothes, like words, are used to compose a poem. By copying ready-to-wear consumer products, Paulin extends the perpetual loop of reciprocal cultural circulation processes linking the vernacular construction of identity to industrial production.

For this exhibition, Paulin will present the film Morceaux choisis (2019), as well as a set of copies of his own clothing, and a white leather book containing four essays expanding on his theoretical formulations of “look.” Additionally, the book OO,UU (2018), which contains an updated version of his text Boom boom, run run—a poetic essay to be read out loud on the cultural history of the sneakers written from the perspective of a Parisian consumer—will be read in a closing performance-lecture on Sunday, May 26, 6pm.

Morceaux choisis [Selected Pieces] is a 16-mm video co-directed by Paulin and Philippe Decrauzat. In the sequences, a gloved hand manipulates several pieces of clothing from Paulin’s closet reproduced by a tailor and containing the artist’s writings. Through the acts of folding, turning over, zipping, and unzipping, the work explores the ambiguity of ordinary gestures, the handling of clothing and the exhibition of a work, the search for a style and the selection of linguistic units.

An example of the garments activated in the video, un look (2017)—a white leather studded copy of a jacket and a pair of pants—will be on view in the show. The items, previously mediated in the digital format, become the concrete support for a text: the pockets contain an essay, the motifs of the lining are used for notes, and the studs disseminate a poem, a fragrance, across the surface of the fabric. The monochromatic composition that displays language, speculatively conceived as the inversion of a book cover, is meant to disappear in the white exhibition space. However, through the touch of language, these objects constitute stylistic figures that become tools of textual dissemination.

The hidden texts manipulated in the video and enclosed in the set of clothing are finally revealed in the book L (2018): arranged in a grid and splitting the page in four structural sections, each “cell” contains an essay that elaborates on the notions of poetics, dissemination, evanescence, and circulation in which Paulin’s artistic project is grounded. The artist invites the audience to read the book by using a pair of white wedding gloves tailored to the size of his hands.

Pierre Paulin (b. 1982, Grenoble, France) lives and works in Paris. He has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); the Ricard foundation, Paris (2016); and the Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation, Paris (2017). In 2017, he had a solo exhibition at the Plateau FRAC, Île-de-France, Paris and, in 2018, he had a solo show at Circuit, Lausanne. His works are part of several public collections including the CNAP, the Frac Basse-Normandie, and the Plateau FRAC Île-de-France. Since March 2019, he has been in residence in New York to work on a book with American poet Tan Lin thanks to the support of the Etant donnés grant from the Institut Français, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d'Art, FACE Foundation, and The Emily Harvey Foundation.