Pascal Rivet's Wooden Sculptures at Frac Languedoc-Roussillon

Pascal Rivet's exhibition at Frac Languedoc-Roussillon in Montpellier (January 17 to March 1, 2003) marks a shift from his earlier focus on sports imagery to the world of labor. The show features life-sized wooden replicas of vehicles—a pizza delivery moped, a Dartymobile, and a rare IH tractor—painted to look real. These sculptures are not ready-mades but representations that test the boundary between art and reality. A video documents the transport of the Dartymobile through the city, capturing public confusion. Photographs show the tractor in agricultural settings with the artist dressed as a farmer. Rivet's work, described as sculpture, uses imitation to explore media representation and self-portraiture without resorting to sociology or ethnography. His previous public appearance was in 2001 at Fondation Cartier in Paris, where he impersonated footballer Fabien Barthez in a penalty shootout as part of the Soirées Nomades series. Critic Jean-Marc Huitorel notes that Rivet's objects achieve full function only as tools for testing reality, placing the work at the heart of contemporary art's tension between merging with reality and maintaining artistic distance.