One day in 1996, when he was invited to give a course at the Ecole des beaux-arts de Châteauroux (Indre), rather than teach class, Pierre Huyghe, 34, put his students on a bus without notice. . Truant school: picnic near the river, mountain to climb, ruins to explore, with watching films by Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky between two stages. He kept the images of this trip, pasted them together on paintings which became works, Extended Holidays.
Make life an “extended vacation”? His whole program was already there. Not to laze around, but to open up to the world, nose to the wind. Feed on it, learn and unlearn. This is how Pierre Huyghe became one of the most unique and renowned visual artists of his time. He did not need, like others, to inflate balloon dogs or pin butterflies at the kilometer. Nor to invade the fairs with more or less derivative products.
Quite simply, he took art off the path and took us on his journey as a storyteller. None of these storytellers junk, who sell dreams to consume. No. Pierre Huyghe is one of those who create before our eyes worlds to inhabit, exhibitions riddled with meanders and obscure works, so many enigmas which invite us, he says, to “understand that one does not understand”.
Revered by his peers
The artist created a primary forest on the stage of the Sydney Opera House, went in search of an albino penguin in Antarctica, took over a flooded island in Norway, staged masquerades and carnivals, gardens, rumors and operas. “Beyond genius”, proclaims one of its first collectors.
Since his Special Jury Prize at the 2001 Venice Biennale, the French artist has won all the awards and been exhibited in the most prestigious museums. Without bowing to market pressure or playing the media game. At 61, revered by his peers, little known to the general public, he has nothing left to prove. Yet here he is again, until November 24, at Pointe de la Douane, one of the two Venetian spaces of the Pinault Collection, in an exhibition entitled “Liminal”.
The museum is plunged into darkness. The visitor passes from one room to another, observing videos and installations. Works that his admirers know reappear: a cast of The sleeping Muse, by Constantin Brancusi, inhabited by a hermit crab, in an aquarium plunged into darkness, or the short film Human Mask (2014), in which a monkey wears a white mask from Noh theater, at once automaton, human and animal. The film Camata (2024) features an astonishing funeral ritual in the Atacama Desert, two robots taking care of a skeleton on the edge of the sand, stranded there for a century. Everywhere, strange characters, on films or in theaters, wandering performers, dressed in talking masks.
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