THOMAS BAYRLE – COWBOY TAPISSERIE PIETA
2016-12-05Cowboy Tapestry Pietà or the meeting of four virgins and a cowboy played by American actor Fred Gwynne. The portrait comes from a screen shot from the film Pet Sematary, adapted from the -Stephen King novel, and shows its pixelated figure on the wall. Here we have a symbol par excellence of America, especially in its evocation of the Pop culture that has been flowering since the late 1960s. But don’t get it wrong, Thomas Bayrle can’t be pigeonholed: he’s no more Pop than Op! In Bayrle’s new exhibition at Air de Paris our cowboy will be rubbing shoulders with a fictional wooden shopping mall and a series of paintings on card from 2012 whose source images date from the artist’s first visit to Japan in 1978. He spent six weeks in Tokyo back then, walking night and day as he photographed the city.
Another fundamental aspect of the Bayrle oeuvre is the move from one medium to another, from the distortion of a once-artisanal motif to the digitally inflected. We find this happening in his installation Capsel, 68 photographs from 1984–1985 documenting the making of a monumental collage showing a man and a woman in bed. Scrutinising this new work, we find that the distortion of the image was effected by printing it onto manually stretched latex – an easier way of simulating ongoing movement. In its current version Capsel gives an eloquent account of brilliant manipulation and transformation of iconic forms.
Opposite – Pieta Blue Telefon, 2015
Exhibition runs through to January 7th, 2017
Air de Paris
32, rue Louise Weiss
75013 Paris
France
