Paul Pouvreau

Like still lifes and living tableaux, Paul Pouvreau’s photographs cultivate singularity and incongruity. In their familiarity with a compositional approach that relates them to fine-art photography, they are always positioned on the edge of something, between the visible and the intangible, between the invisible and the sensible. Pouvreau’s art, which consists in bringing into play both the cultural stereotypes and visual, social and economic codes of our environment, is aimed at turning our world into the theatre of a confusing and derisory daily life, served by the artist’s talent for creating images in which fiction competes with reality to the point of confusion between the two.

“Since it favours uncertainty over certainty, I feel as if my work is a continuous play on the depiction of reality”, Paul Pouvreau explains. For instance, he will take a simple cardboard package printed with a flat-tint green silhouetted landscape motif and place it on a more or less natural grassy base so that the former’s horizon blends into the latter’s. While photography enables him to stage his own reality, Paul Pouvreau’s approach aims for the most part to deconstruct the subject in order to reconstruct meaning. As such, it comes within the scope of a production of images whose purpose is to unveil, whether explicitly or not, the relationships between the elements that compose them. They bring into play questions of scale and layout in a tone that is at once rigorous and playful.

Excerpt from a text by Philippe Piguet, 2007
Translated by Lucy Pons, 2024