Denis Prunier

Denis Prunier was born in 1964 in Caen (FR), where he lives and works

Driver, follow this… sculpture

Stéphane Lemercier: My God, why all these gadgets?
Denis Prunier: When Mother Nature is so perfect?
A nocturnal aphorism.

According to those close to him, Denis Prunier is not the type to play with Meccano sets on rainy Sundays.
In fact, to avoid wet weekends, he quickly fled his native Normandy to haunt La Belle de Mai, a hotspot for tinkering and all kinds of recycling.
It’s organized in cycles, in successive layers, and the mechanics linked to the organ somehow hold up in the air like a miracle.
Not that I want to suggest the environment left its mark on him, no, but one might say there are predispositions, a certain carelessness, or in medical terms, serious antecedents — which wouldn’t surprise me.

For a hurried visitor, the sculptures from the 90s were clearly identifiable.
The poetics wavered between Fluxus and Mickey Mouse Club, all focused on the notion of play, exchange, and gentle amusement.
La vie de château was made of crate wood, airy, elegant.
The artist engaged in a somewhat precious spatial handwriting.
One could even say there was, intentionally or not, a willful bias, a desire to please, not to immediately overturn the jug on the ancestors’ tablecloth.
It was polite, somewhat grunge.

Since then, the situation has worsened. Repeating the disillusionment act given what awaits us would be somewhat misplaced (techno minimalism + New Age scientism), a Bossuet on the ruins of September 11. Misplaced. Off topic. Nevertheless, the time for joking around is over and one day truly, we will have to choose between banquet banter and the radical humor that saws the truth in two. In Prunier’s case, the saving humor finds its origins more in the cinematic universe: the shot in Viridiana where the rejected lover hangs himself with the skipping rope of the girl who appeared in the previous scene, the delirious violence of 2,000 Maniacs, Fellini and his rhinoceros, the final scene of Folies de Femmes where Von Stroheim’s body is thrown into the sewers. That is to say, perverse visual constructions, visual projections where the eye turns inside out. Shortcut. As fast as possible. As precise as possible. So fast that these projections take place where reality once stood and settle there with the insistence of a cheeky child. It’s stronger than us; once noticed, we can no longer get rid of them. They have lifted the veil.

In terms of speed, one must squint towards the Young British Artists to grasp the measure. The French possess to a lesser extent this culture of Night Clubbing of which Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin are perfect examples. Following the English scene of the 80s, this new generation never truly abandoned the sculptural gesture. They simply opted for a more visual, less plastic sculpture, with a shock and provocative image-becoming. These sculptures are the ultimate pirouettes of their sped-up universe; a universe accelerating at the risk of permanent visual crash. This flamboyant misery, Prunier expresses it in his own way. His works are organized strangely, a fragile bridge between sculpture and image, a sorry middle ground of being only that.

A good student of Dietman*, the sculptures are made early in the morning to be undone late at night, interspersed with rolling cigarettes, multiple nervous back-and-forths, Studio/Apartment, Apartment/Studio, Studio/Mr. DIY, Apartment/Editor. Whew! Prunier is like the Road Runner. Repetition as a form of change**.

The same goes for the sculptures—why waste time on incongruous sophistications? Let’s rush it. The puzzle to be assembled will be roughly fixed with a glue gun. Sponges will be burned as morning, loving toasts. We’ll play the social game by customizing a North Neighborhood cap with three Mondrian lights (culture for all), a Walkman will be sacrificed (a tribute to Pierre Boulquiès). Quietly, these silly sculptures defuse the Maison et Tricot aesthetic, an object of the advertising world and pop artists. A world where artists dream of living surrounded by their sculptures, while the whole point is to get rid of them once and for all. Out of sight. Off-screen. Above all, don’t dream.

The speed of execution of these sculptures perhaps aims at the eviction of their very object. Only the title will remain, the Cheshire Cat’s smile, the pun-title as the last sculpture. Duchamp declared: “I have the life of a café waiter,” to which Prunier could add: “I have the humor.” The bad pun seriously clutters the shiny White Cube. As embarrassing as Jacques Lizène’s fecal matter drawings or Christian Boltanski’s coughing man. The same goes for the collages (these two-dimensional sculptures). Scissors. Glue. The reality of bodies will be all the more terrifying as it is considered point by point, detail by detail, limb by limb. A macabre inventory unlike the opening scene of Godard’s Contempt where BB enumerates her fleshy parts for her lover. “Do you like my sculpture?”

The piece titled Heads and Legs, which will be one of the highlights of the exhibition at the Grande Galerie des Bains-Douches, echoes this sentiment. Imagine the pieces of a ceramic bowling set made up of kitsch pink legs and bloodied heads. Slide your fingers between the two enucleated orifices, the mouth open. Aim.

One can laugh at this, one can make a living from it. One can live from anything. I’m dumbfounded. “In tragedy, there are no problems***.”

*On this subject, reread the interview between Erik Dietman and Bernard Lamarche-Vadel in the catalog of the exhibition What is French Art?
** The artist is also passionate about repetitive and electronic music
*** Friedrich Nietzsche, vinyl on plywood…

- Text by Stéphane Lemercier