Perrotin is pleased to present Portrait Mode a solo exhibition by Xavier Veilhan in Paris. The portrait mode seems like the renewal of a historical genre through its digital transformation: the portrait (and the self-portrait) has proliferated endlessly. In the exhibition, the portrait is presented in two dimensions (by combining the techniques of marquetry and painting) and in three dimensions (using digital sculptures of solid wood, among others). The subjects are friends of the artist, members of the studio staff, and everyday animals (birds). Here the self-celebration of each individual through the image is replaced by the celebration of all through the object (here the image passes through the object: marquetry and statuary).
The seats by Vico Magistretti and Rick Owens that furnish the studio were used during the sittings. They are reproduced in a smaller size in the statues but also “really” present in the space: they serve as a living room suite so that the artist can comfortably receive and interact with the visitors.
There is a term that Xavier Veilhan often uses when talking about his work: presence. The presence in the space of the sculptures and of the images that are freed from the two-dimensionality of the wall by materializing as bas-reliefs or illusionistic volumes. The presence of spectators’ bodies walking around perfectly designed exhibitions in the form of gardens or synthetic landscapes. The presence of passersby who share the urban space with his statues of animals, anonymous people, monsters, and architects. The presence of the moving bodies of the performers and dancers who often appear in his films or shows.
More recently, the physical presence of Xavier Veilhan the artist has emerged as a new component in his work. He was very physically engaged during the entire Studio Venezia exhibition, the participative recording studio that he created for the French Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. And he was on stage in Compulsory Figures (2019), a performance created with figure skater Stephen Thompson and designed with scenographer Alexis Bertrand (with whom he has been working since the early 2000s).
This primacy of presence could seem strange in a body of work that has often been identified with digital production processes and the interplay of scale they make possible, or which has been reduced to pixelated colored surfaces. But the pandemic that we have all experienced over the past few years—and the in-person/remote dichotomy it established as a daily reality in our lives—patently revealed that thinking about presence cannot be dissociated from reflections on information technologies.
Technical imagination has fueled much of Xavier Veilhan’s work since his early days as an artist: he has made sculptures of vehicles, machines, and mechanisms; he has been inspired by the great modern story of the conquest of space; he has accompanied the massification of digital images—and the software that allows them to be created and transformed—by producing intriguing generic forms that allegorize this new state of fluid, disembodied, and ubiquitous images. He has highlighted the “transformation of the way we relate to materials today,” and invented surfaces to give form to the widely shared (but not always conscious) intuition that the world of materials and the world of information are now engaged in processes of hybridization. He has reminded us that the systems we use are, first and foremost, programmable and that they are markers of time. By organizing the large-scale circulation of his highly photogenic sculptures, online and through images, he has also seized upon the disruptions to the public space resulting from the democratization of the internet, to which his body of work is the exact contemporary.
It would be simplistic, however, to assimilate his work to a discourse with modernistic and technophile overtones. The technical bodies that people his oeuvre are bodies among many others. Inspired by classical statuary, Xavier Veilhan also rapidly made room for the bodies of animals—penguins, pigeons, bears, rhinoceroses, sharks, dogs—as well as the bodies of viewers, designing exhibition systems that always take the physical existence of visitors into account. In other words, Xavier Veilhan’s corpus shows us that the terrifying fantasy of a mode of disembodied existence in the metaverse, an unchanging productivity punctuated by Zoom meetings, or of an art accessible via viewing rooms and virtual museum visits, meets its limits in the biological reality of human and animal bodies, and the bodies of artworks and machines.
The recent shift in his work, from the series of faceted sculptures to the series of blurred, more organic sculptures, thus holds a demonstrative value. It reveals the passage between two historic moments (from modernity to another period yet to be named) and our general awareness—as we go through an unprecedented crisis of living things and increasingly take into account the interactions that link us to non- human species—that we share the space of this world with other bodies that have their own agency and make us think and act. When Xavier Veilhan explains that what he seeks to recreate in his work are the moments when conversation has been exhausted and the quality of nonverbal copresence afforded by “concerts, shows, and road trips,” he is formulating the idea of the exhibition that has underpinned his practice since the early 1990s. The exhibition is this tool—this technology even—that enables different bodies to stand together. It constitutes a potential model for the cohabitation and composition of different worlds.
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Jill Gasparina
Art Critic, Curator, teacher at HEAD – Genève
View of Xavier Veilhan's exhibition Portrait Mode at Perrotin Paris, 2023.
Photo: Claire Dorn. ©VEILHAN/ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
