Bruno Peinado
Through his sculptures, drawings and installations Peinado attempts to have viewers experience a different outlook on everyday objects, ideas and communication processes.
Peinado could be described as a disc jockey with his continue use of samplers: smileys, disco balls, surf and skateboards, Tetris or Rubik's cube blocks and such are recurrent images in his works.
By twisting these now-iconic images through juxtaposition, they become parts of something new, making a kind of a complex organic system, a parallel world within the exhibition space, rather like a snow globe shaken by artificial weather in a self-contained landscape.
Peinado's multidirectional works comment on each other, much as pop culture does with itself, and even the simplest sculpture or image may hold a wide variety of meanings in his hands.
For example, one of his best known pieces, One Big World, 2001, representing a Michelin Man posing like a black panther, spoke about the employees firing that the company was heading at the time.
On the other hand, by turning the white character into a black one, Peinado acknowledge the real color of tires and the fact that international companies would never have an African originated man representing them.
His crossbreed of ideas and forms describe an internal narrative whose meanings are not always clear to viewers, leaving them free to interpret Peinado's dreamscapes.
Working his collage-like assemblages, highly influenced by graphic's design copy-paste, the artist underline the lack of cultural purity in today's interconnected society.
In pieces like Speedy Revolution (2006), a vegetable-like turning sculpture, or Good Stuff (2004), a structure made of oversized playing cards inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' 1952 piece, and in Native American dreamcatchers like Sadley (2006), Peinado expresses his own personal life experience and the spirit of his time through the process of assemblage, making disparate elements seem to belong together.
The disco ball has taken in his hands the shape of as a skull (Vanityflightcase), a Troyan Horse, 2004, or a turning cement mixer, showing how our brain can manipulate a thought with different and unexpected results.
The endless loop in which history or a sticky advertising jingle comes back again and again, structuring and feeding our mind, is exposed in his exhibitions.
On a formal level, the hyper attractive and very finished surfaces of Peinado's works play against the reality that his art is indeed hand-made, and offers a kind of pop spin on the artistic process in a world of commercial manufacturing, mass production and the illusion of perfection.
And in California Custom Game Over (2006), a series of minimal-art inspired parallelepipeds are crushed on one side; while the cracks on the crystal surfaces of Black Flag (2008), create a kind of beauty out of chaos.
The exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo of Paris in 2004 was actually made of old and new pieces -as said, another characteristic of Peinado's loop strategy- that were placed in an apparent random way throughout the pavilion hall.
It had the effect of creating a dialogue about everyday objects (a car, a huge silver-pearl necklace, a black/grey/white rainbow, an advertising billboard, a giant pantone color guide) and familiar images crafted into hanging black cut-outs: a skate boarder, a tree-shaped car air freshener or a body builder.
In this show, Peinado referred less to everyday objects, relying instead on more symbolic forms and ideas, like a pyramid with its four faces finished on cracked crystal that looked like black marble with white veins.
Accompanying this piece the viewer could found a flat mirror ball hanging from the ceiling, a backlit anarchy Ⓐ with the traces fattened to make it look like a clown, L'Auguste (2007); California Game Over (2007), a series of his crushed parallelepipeds, and other sculptures inspired by Memphis' furniture design completed the show.
Bruno Peinado is represented by: Text online : Les vanités dans l'art contemporai, Edition Flammarion.
Catalogue de l'exposition Antipure organisée par Gianni Jetzer à la Ursula Blickle Stiftung.
