Pierre-Etienne Morelle. Dad, what’s a little brother for?

At the beginning of 2018,  Nicola and Luca came for a studio visit and they asked me to be ready for a show in Milan at the beginning of  next year. We discussed the idea of showing some old video works like “Hier je me suis fait surprendre par la pluie and Défi n° 1”. For me, this was the starting point. Almost twenty years ago, when I shot these videos, I was trying to replay some small accidents of the everyday life. I’m interested in the duality between the person I was years ago and who I am today. I’m also interested in observing the similarities or common features between my two children nowadays. 

In the middle of 2018, my life became slightly busier  as I was about to be a father for the second time. I was preparing  our living space and myself as well, for a new person to arrive. I was wondering how it would have changed our family habits and how the bigger one would have reacted towards the newborn. I always kept these questions in mind while I started working on this show; so I composed linkages between the different works, in which the characteristic of one thing is applied to another and vice versa. Most of the elements are performed to act, somehow, as counterweights or as negatives of one another. 

“Richard” and “Kenneth” are two sculptures in which the balance of the forces and tensions hold its components together, like in our body structure. We are able to stand up because of a synergy of muscles and bones, between continuous pull and discontinuous compression.  This is the connection with my past performative works, in which I was testing the elasticity of my body and materials.

Leopold and Gustave are my sons’ names, and they were the first works produced for this exhibition. They show that the addition of two similar spaces generates a third better space.  The other works are displayed in a way that we feel they are increasing from one to the other.  These works propose spaces, which seem to have been cut through wood, mat board and glass with a very strong and sharp blade, in order to allow them to expand on the wall. I’m not framing a drawing or a photography, but pieces of broken glass which were the result of tests or accidents in the studio, because I feel that the support for exhibiting artwork is already an artwork.

All the relations between the works in the gallery space makes me think that the answer for the title question would simply be: play. 

Pierre-Etienne Morelle

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