Hotel
Vincent Pécoil
(excerpt, p. 95)
Pierre Vadi describes his exhibitions as kinds
of hotels, where the works are the guests.
They stay for a while, then move on, waiting
for the next invitation. Some of them come
with their families, others alone. The people
in a hotel are not a community, but rather
a disparate group of people with little in
common: a shopping trolley, some coconuts,
a rope, some architectural models, sky maps,
a communion wafer, a heap of sugar.
The
works are travellers, not only foreign to the
spaces where they are installed, but also to
each other. Yet this very foreignness is what,
in the end, creates a bond between them,
or at leads the viewer to suspect that there
is some invisible thread connecting them
across the various spaces they inhabit. As the
artist recently wrote for a public presentation
of his work in his Geneva studio, “
My space both unites and scatters objects whose relation
to each other is all the more durable since all
they apparently do is reflect constantly on
their own existence.”
The works are “ just passing through,” with
no fixed home; their place in time is similarly
uncertain. Some of the forms are self-evidently
our contemporaries, reproducing familiar
objects, while others seem to be forwardlooking
vestiges or futurist shapes thrown
up by the past. Add the fact that some of the
objects appear to be incomplete, or that their
role and function seem to belong to a culture
that is not our own, and the exhibition
appears on occasion to become an archaeological
dig, with recently recovered objects
arranged on the floor. This was particularly true of the exhibition
Alcaline Earth (Dijon,
2009), with its works entitled
Fils in the form
of small mummified animals, the various
elements of
Mission moderne, the soft toys
of
Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, the studies
of the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church
and of Mendelsohn's Einsteinturm, and
the books cast in concrete. All these works
shared a resemblance with fossilised remains.
Most of Pierre Vadi's pieces are fairly small
and are placed directly on the floor. The
exhibitions take place in horizontal space,
giving the visitor the impression of an aerial
view. This is not the only way the space
is organised, however: partitions, barriers,
chains, and hanging sculptures punctuate
the layout of the works on the floor, or frame
them, in the case of the painted partitions,
like the edges of the page frame the text.
Walking through one of Pierre Vadi's exhibitions
puts the visitor in mind of one of those
dreams we all have where we are flying over
an expanse of space, or a child's playful imagination
where the world is reduced in scale
and becomes a toy in his hands.
(...)
