I am possessed by it and I will succeed perhaps — not in producing this work in its entirety (I don’t know who one would have to be to do that!) but to show a fragment of it completed, to make its glorious authenticity flicker from one position, indicating the totality of the rest for which a life is not enough.
— Stephane Mallarmé on Le Livre, 1885
Pilar Corrias is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Philippe Parreno. A Recital of True Events offers fragmentary glimpses of potential futures via a series of drawings and paintings on paper that serve as storyboards for dormant films, comic books or scenarios awaiting actualisation. Executed in ink, pigment and oil, meticulously-detailed insects swarm, foreboding clouds gather, eerie forms sway and teeter. A grasping hand punches through an ominous sky; shadowy shapes explore subterranean tunnels; a spotlight trains in on a lone figure stranded in a barren landscape.
Over the past thirty years, Parreno has radically redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as a coherent ‘object’ as opposed to a collection of individual works. To this end he conceives his shows as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. Drawing has remained an integral process throughout, being used to devise many of the film and installation works for which he is best known, including Anywhere Out of the World (2009–17) and C.H.Z (2011).
Following his Fireflies series (2012–16) of standalone drawings, Parreno’s new series of intimate works on paper forefronts this lesser seen yet essential aspect of his conceptual practice. Akin to Stéphane Mallarmé’s The Book (1957) – the poet’s posthumously published collection of fragmentary notes, diagrams and mathematical calculations for the printing and recital of a total text whose exact purpose remains obscure – Parreno’s 100 Questions, 50 Lies (A Recital of True Events) (2023) prophesies the emergence of a narrative for a film that has always existed in the realm of potentiality, but whose realisation demands the invention of an origin.
While the routine world can be anticipated as a series of potential states unfolding from known premises, the extraordinary emerges from the undefined abyss. Like spectral vibrations seeking a collective medium to form a language that might chronicle the genesis of a new cosmogony, Parreno’s work points towards a constellation of prospective plotlines poised for enactment.
Viewers are invited to decipher the signs written on Parreno’s open book, to decode the message that announces both an imminent event and a parallel history. The artist encourages us to consider how might we harness our power to birth fictions, to create space-time crystals that shimmer like waves in an ocean of emerging and vanishing worlds? What narratives will unfold? Will our voice(s) resonate?
