Edouard Prulhiere

Experimental, Edouard Prulhiere's work explores painting's conventions its relationship to space and its showing conditions, as well as the different apparition modalities of an image.

Since the beginning of the 1990's, he paints large canvases, pushing to the limits the vocabulary of abstract expressionism, privileging improvisation and informs, hybridation of gestures, technics and paint applying modes on canvas, itself manipulated and mistreated through the production process. During that same decade he transforms certain of in canvases in sculptures by folding and crumpling them before rolling them up around wood structures on which he would screw them. In the years 2000 his work stretches to creating in-situ installations including wall paintings and ceiling hung bundles of canvas smudged with paint. That is to say, put to test painting's own object materiality in space, obedient to a singular economy of construction and destruction.

Since a few years the artist henceforth created a dialog between painting and photography by means of occultation and deconstruction of silkscreened pictures processes. Monkey & Doll, Hangover and Space Slot participate in this research. From serigraphy screens conceived with Yann Owens, founder of Franciscopolis editions in Le Havre, Edouard Prulhiere explores here new printing mounts and pictures types becoming as well starting points of new manipulations and productions. If silkscreen printing is at the heart of the project it is because this medium is at the crossing of photography and painting: firstly because a serigraphy screen is similar to a matrix close to a negative film, secondly because the ink laid down on the chosen mount is close to an application of colored pigments on a canvas. A way for the artist to question the assimilation of painting to the regimen of pictures and to pursue a practice resolutely "impure" freed from codes and frontiers between practices.

- Sarah Ihler-Meyer