Pierrick Sorin

The artist considers video as an extension of the pictorial field in which the real and the fictional engage in dialogue. Sorin graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Nantes in 1988, and began creating self-portraits of a rather burlesque tone on Super 8. His work was quickly recognised and presented in several exhibitions in France and abroad. The arrival of video and digital media enabled him to take his art further. His trademark is to use skits that underline the petty catastrophes of everyday life with an engaging humour that deeply questions our fascination for the visual as well as the passive consumption of images. Almost all of his works seek to challenge the viewer and take them to task, or even make them an integral, even unwilling, participant in the action. In 1995 he created his first installation with a holographic device that enabled him to include a character that could evolve within the real décor. In 2006, he began doing mise en scènes of operas, using video and optical illusions. In 2009, he authored a play entitled 22h13. He has had exhibitions at the Musée National Fernand Léger in Biot, France (2023), and the Musée d’Art in Nantes (2024).

In 1994, the Fondation Cartier commissioned Sorin to create La Bataille des Tartes (“The Pie Fight”) for the inauguration of their new space on the Boulevard Raspail. Sorin created a video starring himself, depicting “a person who is violently attacked by people throwing pies, and who flees from one screen to the other without ever having the possibility of actually escaping. The result is an energy that evokes both violence and desire in the fraction of a second (as the pie explodes upon their flesh). Pell-mell concepts of painting (coating, colour), war paint (the body 'painted'), sculpture (as the body is 'remodelled' by the cream from the pies), and cinema (a sort of burlesque version of Eadweard Muybridge's work).” In 2001, the Fondation Cartier commissioned him to design an exhibition that he conceived as a total work in and of itself, including filming himself and assuming multiple identities, 3D images, and a total occupation of the space, including the installation of devices for presenting the videos and an unveiling of all of his special effects. The presented works were incorporated into three works from the permanent collection: La Bataille des Tartes (1994), La Belle Peinture Est Derrière Nous (1989), and Projections (1997).