Ernest Pignon-Ernest’s Existential Art on the Walls of Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia
The Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia shines with urban art. The luxurious walls of the space’s top floor, located just steps away from San Marco, are being metamorphosed into a peeling urban surface to host the moving works of Ernest Pignon-Ernest. “Je Est Un Autre”, an exclusive exhibition conceived for the Espace, offers the public a collection of works dedicated to poets such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rimbaud. Alongside them, other portraits, this time unpublished, inspired by the Russian Anna Akhmatova, who died in Moscow in 1966 after a life tragically marked by the Soviet regime, and the Iranian Forough Farrokzhad, a significant figure in the rebirth of Persian poetry. Dramatic figures in line with Pignon-Ernest’s spirit, a pioneer of street art, who has always explored uncharted territories by mixing technique and existentialism. The Venice exhibition, curated by Suzanne Pagé and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with the contribution of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, is part of the Beyond the Walls program that extends through the spaces of the Fondation. On the occasion of the press preview and the vernissage various figures from the cultural world intervened. From artist JR to curators Obrist and Pagé, from Jean-Paul Claverie, Administrator of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and personal advisor to Bernard Arnault, to the esteemed director of Beaux Arts, Fabrice Bousteau, and to the critic Gilles Kraemer. “I try to capture everything that is seen: the texture of the wall, the color,” Pignon-Ernest once said, “and at the same time I study everything that is not seen: the history of the place, its memory, buried memories…”. Here, in Venice, a compendium of his entire poetic is concentrated.
Text: Germano D’Acquisto
Photos: Ludovica Arcero
