.Presentation of the school - Nîmes

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E.S.B.A.N. teaching staff
Augustin PINEAU
augustin.pineau.free.fr + venusdailleurs.fr + artistelr.fr
Born in Bordeaux in 1968, lives and works in Nîmes
‘The duty of the right eye is to look through the telescope while the left
eye questions the microscope.’ 1
‘How to convert thinking into images and an image into memory; how
to reduce the world to a finished set of representations and change all
knowledge into a show.’ 2
In art, images are too often designed from their perception, forgetting
that their handling involves the whole of the ‘psyche’ at the level of
memory… Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses in Greeks
mythology. The mnemonic technique developed strongly in the sixteenth
century by Giulio Camillo in Teatro della Memoria may seem to us today
to be an anachronistic curiosity unless it is seen in its context. In The Art
of Memory, Frances A. Yates made an inventory of the attempts made
at classification from Ancient Greece and Rome until the Renaissance
and she reminded us that what stimulated Renaissance interest in occult
memory was the Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance itself 3 . However,
here it is about a quest for things that are hidden or even invisible, one of
the inherent dimensions of art, in the manner of a cryptogram.’
Théâtres de la mémoire
Bertrand Meyer-Himhoff
‘Collage is explored to within its tiniest nooks and crannies. First, printed
images accumulate in a studio, but not just any old images. There
is a collector’s logic in the quest for them, in the chance of meeting
them and in their classification. The work gains meaning little by
little according to the laws of relative etymology during its assembly,
following a very personal chain of association, by resonance and not by
matching. Everything finally fits and is adjusted. Augustin Pineau likes
packs of cards, boxes of games—snakes and ladders or Pope Joan. He
sometimes recycles older collages. Each work is a meticulous miniature.
Every detail is justified by juxtaposition with another to give a new,
significant general figure. The principle is that of a mythological bestiary
that is universal or personal for the artist in which men and animals
merge, that of the mythical figures that made a lasting impression during
our childhood or the more scholarly bestiary of heraldry. The collages
are carnivals of objects, constellations of instants, travel boxes (generic
titles). Call can be made on Raymond Roussel for the process, Marcel
Duchamp for his ‘Célibataire’ machines and his taste for jokes but why
not the Joyce of Finnegans Wake… We are in and remain in a coherent
plastic universe where, in spite of fragmentation, synthetic unity wins
over chaos. Augustin Pineau’s reconstituted images function like ours;
they are books of spells (spelling) in which you have to put the puzzle
together by reassembling the pieces to know who we are and possibly
find out how to interpret dreams …’
Le parapluie de tournesol ou le piment rouge
Bertrand Meyer-Himhoff
1 Léonora Carrington
2 Bertrand Schefer, préface, " le théâtre de la mémoire " Guilio Camillo ed Allia 2001
3 F. A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966
le bouchon d’épouvante
Collage
46,3 x 29,5 cm