ART CITIES:Porto-Philippe Parreno

Philippe Parreno is a French Avant-Garde artist who came to prominence in the ‘90s, he works across film, video, sound, sculpture, performance and information technology and collaborates extensively with musicians, scientists, architects and writers and is perhaps most widely known for his collaboration with Douglas Gordon for the film “Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait” (2006).

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art Archive

“A Time Coloured Space” is Philippe Parreno’s first solo exhibition at Portugal and spans on thirteen rooms, across two floors of Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition is structured on the mathematical model of the fugue, and conceived around the idea of the counterpoint, or ritournelle, a principle, whereby a particular passage is repeated at regular interludes within a musical arrangement to create compositional meaning. Governed by a similar method, “A Time Coloured Space” is determined not by its ‘objects’, but by the regularity and rhythm of their appearance, featuring some of Parreno’s most emblematic work dating back to the ‘90s. Throughout his practice, Parreno has redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a coherent “object” and a medium in its own right, rather than as a collection of individual works. He conceives his exhibitions as a scripted space in which a series of events unfold. Placed within the philosophical framework of Giles Deleuze’s “Difference and Repetition” (1968), each of the exhibition’s rooms is a recurrence of the last, differentiated only by variations in color and arrangement. By introducing these recurring variables, Parreno takes the Ritournelle* principle beyond its musical understanding to what Deleuze described as “a repetition of the different”. Among the works included are Parreno’s “Speech Bubbles” (1997- ), helium-filled balloons in the shape of cartoon speech bubbles. Empty of words, they congregate and hover on the ceiling of the space they inhabit. Also returning is “Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and then December it’s Christmas” (2008-16), an ongoing series of aluminium sculptures cast as snow-covered Christmas trees. More than 180 of Parreno’s ink drawings, created between 2012 and 2015, are also on display. The drawings form the basis of the filmic animation “With a Rhythmic Instinction to be Able to Travel Beyond Existing Forces of Life” (2016), a perpetual Danse Macabre controlled by an organic cellular system that is  projected in the Serralves Auditorium as a Cinéma en Permanence. A recent addition to the Serralves Museum’s permanent collection, “Quasi Objects: Marquee (cluster). Disklavier Piano. My Room is a Fish Bowl” (2014), are also on presentation. “Marquee (cluster)” is the first work from Philippe Parreno’s ongoing series of marquees to consist of several, independently programmable elements. It is also the first to wrap around a corner. Guitar pick-ups amplify the electrical currents, creating an audible articulation of the pulsating lights.

*Ritournelle: A repeated musical phrase separating larger units, a “petit air” or a snatch of song.

Info: Curator: Suzanne Cotter, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Rua D. João de Castro 210, Porto, Duration 3/2-7/5/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.serralves.pt