An Oneiric Portal
Ariel Claudet, architect and visual artist, together with Pierre Louvet, architect, were commissioned to create a booth for the PERPITCH & BRINGAND gallery at the 20th international PAD art fair in Paris.
ARIEL CLAUDET WITH PIERRE LOUVET
From Ariel Claudet and Pierre Louvet’s words, PAD is a fair for emotional collectors: “An emotional collector wants to get an art piece to live with it, under the same roof and not to store it in a Freeport. We want to help him dream, to make the booth an oneiric portal where Vincent Fournier’s and Philippe Nacson’s art pieces would be pre‐abstracted. It is all about triggering a daydream in the emotional collector’s mind while slipping some specific images in: PERPITCH & BRINGAND gallery artists’ pieces.
ARIEL CLAUDET
The booth has its origins in Ariel Claudet’s artistic realm. In his work Ariel Claudet designs houses set up in the imaginary world. Through their installations made in collaboration with Pierre Louvet, they bring those fictions into our material dimension and highlight the permeability between the realities of the imaginary world and the physical realm.
At PAD 2016, they reverse the process involved in their previous installations. It is no more the imaginary world that they invite in the physical one, but the visitors they bring into a dream world.
“It is a dream booth that we designed for the PERPITCH&BRINGAND gallery, a place suitable for
apr 22, 2016
the abstraction of the art pieces from the context of the fair. Amongst the other galleries we only see our booth, once in it, we only see the art pieces.”
LITTERATURE
Ariel Claudet’s artistic realm has strong literary roots. The insider can easily detect Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes or Xavier Forneret’s in uence, but it is a quote from Michel Leiris’ Manhood that pictures the best the 2016 PERPITCH & BRINGAND’s booth literary liation:
« So profound was my longing to escape reality (...) that I evoked it even in certain plans that a ected my daily life. I told Kay, for instance, that I dreamed of living with her in a house with many elements existing only in trompe‐l’œil: trompe‐l’œil logs would burn in a trompe‐l’œil replace; chairs and couches would be painted on the wall, we would sit and lie on the oor, and there would be servants in e gy. The only thing that remained unformulated (and which I probably desired, moreover, very obscurely) was that the woman that lived with me in this house would also be only a trompe‐l’œil woman »
-Michel Leiris, Manhood, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, « folio», 1939 (p.122‐23)
