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Pierre Leguillon

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Pierre Leguillon
Born(1969-05-23)23 May 1969
Nogent-sur-Marne, France
Known forInstallation, video, artist museum
Notable workDiaporama (1993–2006), The Great Escape (2011), The Promise of the Screen (2007–), Diane Arbus' (2008)
MovementConceptual art

Pierre Leguillon (born 23 May 1969) is a French conceptual artist living in Brussels, Belgium. His artistic practice is primarily concerned with the production and reproduction of images, a theme explored throughout his career.[1]

Biography

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Pierre Leguillon was born on 23 May 1969 in Nogent-sur-Marne, France.[2] He studied visual arts at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne from 1989 to 1992. In the early 1990s, he began his career as an art critic and editor.[3] In 1991, then a student, Pierre Leguillon launched the single-page magazine Sommaire.[4] In 1992, he organised the exhibition Des Hauts et des bas in Paris in a small maid's room. The following year, he photographed Hans Ulrich Obrist's exhibition Hôtel Carlton Palace chambre 763.[3]

With his first slide show in 1993, Leguillon described his visits to exhibitions using carefully framed, medium-format (4.5 x 6 cm) slides, supplemented by photos from publications. By 1999, he had removed spoken commentary entirely, focusing solely on the manipulation of images and sounds, adjusting each presentation with props, voice-overs, and positioning of the screen. Until 2006, he identified as a diaporamist or "slide artist".[3]

The Diaporama series became a compendium of his entire body of work, wherein one image would call upon another, or be relayed through its soundtrack. In 2001, he edited the publication accompanying Raymond Hains' retrospective at the Centre Pompidou. Known for his wordplay, Hains influenced Leguillon's Museum of Mistakes, founded in Brussels in 2013, a collection that challenges traditional museum hierarchies and art-historical structures.[1] The exhibition was launched at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels in January 2015, where he cultivated a playful approach to art and curation.[3] In 2010, he became a lecturer at HEAD-Genève in Switzerland.[3]

In 2003, he was a resident at the French Academy in Rome (Villa Medici), and in 2021, he received the Prix Bob Calle du livre d'artiste.[3]

Works

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Leguillon's work is deeply connected to photography and the accumulation of images. He often collects, classifies, and arranges images in various configurations, challenging traditional notions of artistic hierarchy and linearity.[5] His early work involved photographing shop window displays, which he equated with the concept of a vitrine—a glass display case that, much like a camera, captures and frames its subject. One of his early works, created in 1989 in Prague, depicted an uninhabited vivarium, emphasising the absence of its subject.[5]

Leguillon has frequently interrogated the ways artworks are reproduced and perceived. His 2008 exhibition Diane Arbus: A Printed Retrospective 1960–1971 at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris examined Diane Arbus's editorial photography by presenting the original magazine pages behind glass, challenging notions of authenticity and aura.[6] Similarly, his 2013 project Dubuffet Typographer showcased samples of Jean Dubuffet's handwriting as geological strata, disrupting conventional museum displays.[7]

Leguillon resists the traditional white-cube gallery model, often presenting his works in unconventional formats. His Prelinger Drawings (2011/15) utilised framed frottages within a free-hanging textile structure, inspired by the geospatial taxonomy of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco.[8] Another major work, The Great Escape (2012), involved a multimedia performance featuring dance imagery and music by Amy Winehouse, creating a dynamic interplay between images and movement.[9]

Diaporama

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For approximately 15 years, Leguillon employed the slide-lecture format as a poetic and performative means of exploring images. In 1993, he premiered his lecture-performance series Diaporama, in which he presented photographic slides of exhibitions, books, artworks, and performances. Over time, he refined this approach, incorporating sound and textual fragments to transform Diaporama into an autonomous art form.[10] One notable evolution of this work was Diaporama/Vestiaire (2006), an interactive event in which attendees' coats were incorporated into the performance, creating a visual and conceptual interplay between audience and screen.[10]

The Promise of the Screen

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In 2007, Leguillon initiated La promesse de l'écran ('The Promise of the Screen'), a project that began as a speakeasy in Paris featuring a flip-up film screen that concealed a bar. The project expanded into an ongoing series of screenings featuring unconventional and marginal films, often structured as thematic montages or guest presentations.[7] This work exemplifies Leguillon's engagement with paratexts—the contextual elements surrounding artworks, such as invitations, transport crates, and exhibition materials.[10]

Inspired by Gilles Deleuze's notion that cinema "surrounds images with a world", Leguillon manipulates screening formats to explore how context shapes perception.[11] The project traveled across Europe, adopting a 4:3 screen set before a wine bar, ensuring an interactive and captive audience. Leguillon prioritises site-specificity, preferring marginal contexts over institutional settings. Notable iterations included projections of Josef Albers' Homage to the Square alongside LP covers he designed and John Baldessari's Six Colourful Inside Jobs (1971), emphasising projection's materiality. Later versions featured sculptural elements, such as Cécile Bart's translucent canvases, which refracted projected images to reinforce Deleuze's concept of the image as both actual and virtual.[11]

Museum of Mistakes

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In 2013, Leguillon established the Museum of Mistakes in Brussels, an institution dedicated to challenging art-historical norms and dismantling traditional museological structures.[12] A collection of seemingly disparate ephemera, including postcards, posters, magazines, and everyday objects, stored in his kitchen furniture,[13] the museum deconstructs the idea of modernist progression and includes a shop and a rotating set of guides, reinforcing its anti-market stance.[12]

His 2019 exhibition Learning from Looking at the Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris featured works created with Kyozo Shimogawa, a Japanese master of the Kasuri weaving technique. It employs natural fibers and pigments while incorporating Jacquard looms imported by Shimogawa's grandfather and adapted to the dimensions of kimono fabric strips. Through this collaboration, Leguillon continues to explore the intersections of tradition and modernity, as well as the transmission of artistic techniques across cultures.[14]

Exhibitions

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Leguillon's work has been exhibited at numerous prestigious institutions, including the Louvre, Paris (2009); MAMCO, Geneva (2010); Moderna Museet, Malmö (2010); WIELS, Brussels (2015); and Frye Art Museum, Seattle (2019).[3]

References

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  1. ^ a b Porter 2022, pp. 16–17.
  2. ^ "Pierre Leguillon". Centre national des arts plastiques.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g Porter 2022, p. 17.
  4. ^ Besson 2017, pp. 63–65.
  5. ^ a b Porter 2022, p. 9.
  6. ^ Porter 2022, p. 13.
  7. ^ a b Porter 2022, p. 12.
  8. ^ Porter 2022, p. 14.
  9. ^ Porter 2022, p. 15.
  10. ^ a b c Porter 2022, p. 11.
  11. ^ a b Budd 2012.
  12. ^ a b Porter 2022, p. 16.
  13. ^ Romagny 2021.
  14. ^ Cozzolino & Golsenne 2019.

Sources

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Further reading

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