Absurative

"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

"Within the juxtaposition of all possible things that are “painting” one that Prulhiere provides us with we can observe his attempt to preserve and respectively assert painting’s frontality, optical space, articulation of surface, composition, gesture, drawing, process, structure, materiality and color. He struggles to have each of these play its role within a complex whole, while avoiding the privileging of one quality at the expense of the others. In this Prulhiere can be accused of being a formalist – for while his works often seem to be about something that is be locatable in terms of being formally didactic – this about-ness and the formalist innovation it entails is not their principle objective, but merely an unavoidable consequence of its Subject having to be manifested as some “thing”. His formalism rooted in French thought is structuralist and its logic traces residue of a “thing’s” becoming, it reflects the metonymic structure of a thing’s organizational principles."
Extract from Saul Ostrow text

"For me, the studio is a precious place, I like to compare it to the brain. If you think about it, your own brain, despite all its shortfalls, is the only paradise you have. In your brain you are free.
You do things that you won't do in real life, because you would have to bear the consequences. A studio is like a copy of the brain. It’s a place where you try out various things, where you have permission to fail. I think that art is probably the only field or discipline where vulnerability is thought of as a good quality. That’s one of the things that make art special.
In my practice each elements participates in a kind of tale where body and gestures, different surfaces and materials connect fragments and concepts sometimes antagonistic to a commun origin, painting. A movement, a gesture is never neutral. It’s a process that speaks to us about transformation where different forms of abstraction disrupts meanings and where all is possible."
Edouard Prulhiere