黑料不打烊

Almine Rech is pleased to announce French artist C茅sar Piette鈥檚 second solo exhibition with the gallery, in which he applies his trademark style to a perennial subject of philosophy, literature and art: the humble butterfly. Since the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Chinese, butterflies have served as a metaphor, and artists as varied as Katsushika Hokusai, Frida Kahlo, and Damien Hirst have used them to illustrate themes such as the potential for transformation as well as the brevity of life and the flight of the soul. 

And while there are thousands of varieties of butterfly, no lepidopterist has ever captured one that quite resembles the creature in Piette鈥檚 paintings, slightly slumped on a blade of grass, a few teeth poking out of its open mouth. Piette depicts the winged insect in a variety of materials and textures: silver, colorful plastic, marble, ice, gold and ivory, and against varied backdrops: a single color, a hazy landscape, a starry sky. One is dripping as if melting, while another, in a witty touch, has a silver head with patches of blue paint, as though partially worn away 鈥� a painting of a painted thing, a brand-new object simulating the ravages of time.

Piette鈥檚 serial treatment emulates artists like Monet painting cathedrals or haystacks, or C茅zanne depicting Mont Sainte-Victoire in Aix-sen-Provence (not far from where the artist lives, in the South of France). When working in series, artists focus on formal elements like composition, light, shape, and framing, creating multiple effects from a single subject. But while Monet or C茅zanne had to move their easel to depict a different angle, or wait hours for varying light effects, Piette simply chooses his effects from a drop-down menu. Before becoming an artist, Piette worked in fields like illustration, comics, and video games. Dissatisfied with his early attempts at painting, he has said, 鈥淚 decided to go extreme and do the worst painting I could鈥� while embracing aspects of his past training, which led to his unique present style, which he has described as 鈥渃olor-saturated, illusionistic, without marks or textures, flat, cartoony, non-narrative, and self-referential,鈥� adding, 鈥淭his is unbearable for a lot of people.鈥�

The artist first renders his subjects in monochrome using 3D software, then converts these digital files into physical objects using airbrushed acrylic paint, removing traces of the hand and creating what appear to be photorealistic renditions of toy-like human or animal figures, or improbably shiny landscapes. But what does it mean to create such 鈥渞ealistic鈥� renditions of unreal people and things? His work partakes of a world of simulation that already dominates phenomena like movies and advertisements, perhaps to a greater extent than most viewers realize, says the artist. In his butterfly paintings, Piette depicts a timeless subject in a traditional representational mode after using a purely modern technique to simulate that which he represents.