The Times They Are A Changing

The latest works by Bruno PEINADO (*1970), one of the most  recognized contemporary French artists, can be read as a carefully arranged composition. With great pleasure and a rather playful approach it challenges and questions established categories and conventions, which tend to manifest borders and limitation. Characteristic for PEINADO’s artwork the pieces make references to high culture and pop culture, the tension created through this interaction merges to a fusion between humorous lightness and seriousness, between the personal and the general.

Pale rose dominates in PEINADO’s works. A light colour which immediately reminds the visitor on childhood and amusement or a particular political stance, instead of ideas with are associated with a successful career of an artist.

Furthermore, PEINADO’s paintings refer to Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. In the centre of attention of those works lies the idea that the arranged can never be conventional or marginal. Here the reduced light coloured paintings become the extraordinary, in truth, the extraordinary beautiful. With this thought PEINADO connects the artwork with the aesthetical concept of Wabi-Sabi, again coming from the Japanese tradition. It says that the acceptance and contemplation of imperfection, so as it is applied in the Japanese potter art, as broken pottery will not be destroyed but used to create a new and aesthetically much stronger piece.  Also in the sculptural works of PEINADO this concept is continued and underlines the significance of the imperfection, which is deliberately put into a social political context in order to provide an alternative concept against the force of perfection and the pressure that comes along with it. They successfully argue against interchangeability and resits the trend of permanent renewability.

The pale rose, the forms of the objects, the pastel shades of the drawings and pedestals also remind on Suprematismus, on colour field painting, on the artist group BMPT or on the Californian Minimalists, on the Shirley Jaffe, Richard Tuttle, Günther Förg or Nathalie Du Pasquiers work.

Its aesthetic links with PEINADO’s previous visual approach and exemplifies the central idea of “The Times They Are A Changing”: to overcome viewing habits and to invite the visitor to playfully re-interpret and connect the multilayered aspects of the exhibition, in order to explore and open up to finally let the new arise.