Guillaume Pinard's Con-Con Universe at CAPC Bordeaux

The CAPC musée d'art contemporain in Bordeaux, France, presented an exhibition of Guillaume Pinard from May 22 to August 31, 2003. Pinard's work spans painting, drawing, animation, installation, video, and written notes, all revolving around a character named Con-Con. This figure embodies a smooth, generic value, easily assuming extreme roles and provoking scabrous visions. Pinard mixes sensations, fantasies, and echoes from popular, minor, industrial forms, creating absurd, buffoonish situations. His style employs clear lines, flat colors, proliferation, erasure, acceleration, and digression, blending sophistication, triviality, and humor. He moves fluidly between registers, never stationary, always advancing and dispersing. His work is simple, direct, and legible, yet exudes a troubling uncertainty due to the impossibility of adopting an overarching viewpoint. Sexuality, mutilation, transgenic and transgenre mutation, bloody experimentation, and the hacking of clichés from B-movies, horror, and fantasy cinema form a continuous spiral of words and images around an essential void. The character Con-Con increasingly withdraws, leaving a space for a fictional effect that arises in the hollow of multiple interpretations, paradoxically filling and emptying simultaneously. The exhibition was curated by Didier Arnaudet.