Pierre Leguillon: the song song speechless show Event

Pierre Leguillon’s current studio is a small, homemade movie theatre cum bar in the Paris office of an architect and a photographer. The work he produces there he has dubbed “La promesse de l’écran” (The promise of the screen); it takes the form of a twice-monthly invitational, wherein invited artists are asked to present a screening program to an invited audience, intermittently interrupted for drinks by the screen’s raising, which reveals the bar behind it.

Leguillon’s last exhibit in Vienna, in 2003, was a series of slide shows at the Secession. Thoroughly non-narrative, these presentations aim to evoke the limitless possibility for meaning inherent in images and ideas alike. A strain of wit always attends this ambition, modulating it and making it palatable. A photograph of an object, for example, will often subtly undermine that object’s generally perceived identity, as when images of Carl Andre’s sculptures are matched with middle eastern music and the words “Interlude: flying carpets.” This teasing is in harmony with the slideshows’ persistent sense of narrow evasion, the feeling that rhetorically coherent meaning is always about to be revealed in the next image.

For The Song Song Speechless Show, Leguillon will present an opening night performance at 7.30 pm. On the artist’s request, no information about the contents of this event are to be released.

Pierre Leguillon (b. 1969, Nogent-sur-Marne, France) lives and works in Paris. He has exhibited widely in France and abroad. Recent projects have been hosted at CapcMusee d’art contemporain, Bordeaux (2008), Galerie Airs de Paris, Paris (2008), Galerie France Fiction, Paris (2008), and Galerie Antonio Henriques, Viseu, Portugal (2008). In 2003, the artist had his first and only exhibition in Vienna until now, a series of performances at the Secession. In the past decade he has also exhibited at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. On 28th January 2009, Leguillon will present the piece Slideshow/Cloakroom in “Paper Show” at the Artist’s Space, NYC (curated by Raimundas Malašauskas), and on 5th December 2008 he will curate the exhibition “Diane Arbus : Printed Restrospective, 1960-1971” at the Kadist Foundation in Paris.