Pablo Pijnappel
Kadist Foundation, Paris, France
Rio (2005), 16mm film, 5 min (loop), courtesy carlier I gebauer, Berlin
The work of Brazilian artist Pablo Pijnappel has a charmed relationship with the past. Combining the rare generosity of the storyteller with an intimate appreciation of the mystery of images, Pijnappel’s practice addresses the function, construction and many guises of narrative in our lives. Entitled ‘André’, this exhibition comprises three works: a slide projection, a 16mm film and a video. All three draw upon the artist’s biography and are linked, as in Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy, by a single figure, Andrew — Pijnappel’s Scottish stepfather.
The first of the three works, Felicitas (2005), a three-channel slide projection inspired by the history of a close family friend, is reminiscent of W.G. Sebald’s meditation upon exile The Emigrants (1993), but without the elegiac pathos. Three synchronized projectors tell the fragmented and wending tales, via captioned slides, of a whole host of predominantly European characters — Felicitas, Annette, Astrid, Michael, Maya, Andrew, França and others — and their extravagant, wandering lives, loves, petty jealousies, illicit activities and sometimes criminal pasts. Many images, in which Andrew and Felicitas are repeatedly seen, clearly come from a personal archive, while others are taken from newspapers. This mixing of the personal and the public reflects upon the pliable, narrative fungibility of images, whatever their origin. At times a single image is used throughout a whole narrative sequence, such as when we learn that ‘Dieter a.k.a. Michael’’s smuggling enterprise goes belly up, becoming more mysterious, even nonsensical the more it is projected. Elsewhere, another is zoomed in on, as if to perform some apparently normal, yet ultimately inscrutable cinematic function. Much manipulation of imagery and narrative takes place, and it is intriguingly impossible to know just how much of this could be fact and how much fiction, rendering this work richly vulnerable to any number of associations and readings.
Rio (2005), more of a footnote to Pijnappel’s practice than an autonomous work, is a short 16mm film that consists primarily of various views of the eponymous city. At one point, towards the end of the film, Andrew makes a cameo while dozing in a hammock in a sunlit apartment— a surprise that retroactively personalizes all the preceding anonymous metropolitan imagery. This work segues into Andrew Reid (2003), a video projection in the last room, which shows Pijnappel’s vain attempts on the phone to get his stepfather to travel from Latin American to Amsterdam to participate in a project. The frustrating and comedic conversations, which take place in Portuguese, are projected in English subtitles upon a black screen, periodically alternating with a female English voiceover that recounts episodes from Andrew’s picaresque life, which is visually complimented by brief clips from movies such as Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984) or Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982). While Felicitas, both a multi-part narrative and a meditation upon narrative, expands beguilingly outwards, Andrew Reid is an altogether more personal affair, withdrawing into itself and taking from the viewer a little more than it gives.
The overall feeling of ‘André’, however, is one of refreshing generosity, the will to seek, and a respect for and interrogation of the power of narrative. ‘To a greater or less extent, everyone depends on stories, on novels,’ wrote Bataille, ‘to discover the manifold truth of life. Only such stories, read sometimes in a trance, have the power to confront a person with his fate.’ Something of the magic of this histrionic statement is imparted here, constructing that magic as much as it takes it apart.
Chris Sharp
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