The Perishable Papers of Pierre Pilonchéry

With its bin tilted backwards, a truck prevails at the centre of a quadrangular metallic structure. Thousands of sales catalogues similar to those that invade our mailboxes and homes each day escape from the truck’s container. These fliers rarely command our attention. In general, the garbage can is their immediate destination, followed by the city dump. Only just printed and shipped out of the ­manufacturing plant, already these ephemeral documents are almost garbage. Pilonchéry draws his raw materials from this uninterrupted flux of printed paper. He appropriates this proliferation of images, surfaces, and colours, modifies its contours, and transforms its destination. He pulls even strips from these thousands of brochures and weaves them ­methodically, endlessly, creating immense surfaces destined to be staged, ­manipulated, posted up, suspended, and crumpled. 

In the project titled Les Catalogues Publicitaires (P7), 1999-2001, one of the 3 by 10.8 metre canevassages (weavings) is ­suspended to the ­structure behind the dump truck. For the pile of ­degraded materials, the weavings’ inclusion in the ­installation ­materializes the possibility of escaping its usual fate through the intervention of “artistic recycling.” By means of cutting and interlacing the various strips, the original images become fragmented and disappear in favour of a new weft.