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“We have never been confronted by such images, which are so direct, so devoid of romanticism and yet so sensitive at the same time. Pin-Fat presents his work in gigantic albums, which refer more to the format of ‘real’ cinema than to documentary, emphasizing the fascinating aspect of his generous as well as disturbing approach.
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Unceasingly seeking to repudiate the limits of direct representation to favour impressionism, questioning an unstable universe, his images are unclassifiable."
Christian Caujolle (1998) - artistic director, curator, critic, author and lecturer
“...Pin-Fat’s photographs can appear like detritus, their often eroded surfaces suggest dissolution and his images typically capture last or final moments: before darkness falls, disintegrating architecture, eruptions that destroy the beauty of the human body; and, in the very grain of the photographs’ rhetoric, a sense of seconds before consciousness fails. The worlds that Pin-Fat depicts always seem about to disappear.
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And here we can contemplate the extremes of existence, the edges of our otherwise mundane realities, and a journey to physical and perceptual limits that has its literary corollary in the works of, say, Pierre Guyotat or Jean Genet. The American author Gary Indiana wrote that the prose of the former enacts ‘…a continual demolition of structural elements and distinctions between “I” and others, self and things…’ but conceded ‘All writing is approximate, all language a substitution; Guyotat’s is less distant from it describes than what readers are conditioned to digest’. It remains an open question how any artist can truly arrest us without becoming lost to the aesthetic but Pin-Fat comes very close to creating fissures in the screen between the world, how we experience it, and how it can be represented back to us.“
Brian Curtin (2014) - critic, lecturer, author and curator
Olivier Pin-Fat is working solely in analogue & predominantly through installations and the book medium - specifically with editions of handmade artists’ books (or objects), but also in publishable (trade) formats - all of which he sees as the same energy being transmuted into alternative forms, architectures or expressions. By creating these different experiences and readings of his ‘photo-graphics’, the innate entropy and mutability of the work’s content, as well as the inesacpable inner (and outer) nature of the medium itself - light, time, materiality, the penultimate fade and inevitable decay (or oxidatisation) of ‘the image’ - is enhanced.
Deliberately using a process which is hard to control, Pin-Fat accepts the disappearances and losses inherent to darkroom practice to embrace the accidental.
Paralleling a frayed, damaged and mutable way of being/seeing both psychologically and literally - a large part of his practice particularly from 2003 onwards has leaned heavily, but not exclusively, on the destruction of the image itself, often involving the vandalism of film prior to (or sometimes during) film development itself.
This process results in the erosion or deletion of much of what he actually photographs with the camera, if not a total destruction (or ‘still-birth’) then in the least a rupture of the emulsion’s surface. In this sense, a secondary ‘decisive moment’ ostensibly occurs for him after the initial photographic (f)act has taken place - a fermentation far away from the conjunction of elements recorded by the camera itself, happening unseen in the developing tanks, & finally culminating in what comes out of them (or in the majority of cases, doesn’t). In this sense he works with (on and around) what is ‘given’, what has emerged out of the wreckage, what some strange ‘providence’ he doesn’t claim to understand has granted him.
Using an array of different film stocks (often outdated) and printing on vintage, traditional / standard silver gelatin photographic papers - as well as ‘handmade’ photographic plates he emuslifies in the darkroom himself on other materials - he creates oftentimes unwieldy photographic media or ‘streams of (un)consciousness’ out of what survives his often violent processes.
Often working on and with the print itself also, either on the plate’s base-surface prior to emulsifying in the darkroom or demolishing the finished print itself by tearing and reconstructing, he often creates ‘collage forms’ - which through their innate scrambled, kaleidoscopic damage he sees as more honest than their straightforward, more pristine and clearer counterparts.
His work has been exhibited both as solo and group shows such as in the Centro Cultural Conde-Duque (Madrid, PHotoEspaña 2001), Le Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie (1998), About(Photography)Gallery (Bangkok, 1996), (About)Cafe & Studio Gallery (Bangkok, 1998), The Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre (2009,10,11), H Gallery (Bangkok, 2010,11), The Museum Botanique (Brussels, 2018), Galerie VU (Paris, 2002,3,4), Paris Photo (VU - 2005, 2007), Agnes B (Paris/London, 2008), Pingyao International Photo Festival (Shanxi, China, 2001), Nederlands Foto Institute (Rotterdam, 2000), Copperfield Gallery (London, 2015), NACC (Bangkok, 2016), Lianzhou International Photo Festival (in the ’the candy factory’ - Lianzhou, China, 2006), the old gasworks/gaswerken at UNSEEN (Amsterdam, 2012), Noordelicht Gallery (Groningen, Netherlands, 2013), L’atelier Cinq - Arles (2015), Galerie Honoré (Paris, 2015), Unsocial Studio Gallery (Modena, Italy, 2022), Le Plac’Art Photo (Paris, 2022, 2023), and Galerie S. (Paris, Feb/March 2025) - to mention a few.
From 1998-2008 he was a member of Agence|Galerie VU in Paris, and in 2012 he co-founded the collective ‘AM projects’.
His book MEAT (éd,Void-2018) was a finalist for The Rencontres d’Arles Book Award // Prix du Livre d’Auteur in 2019.
Many of his books can be found in notable public collections such as Maison Européenne de la Photographie / La MEP (Paris), MoMA Library (NY, USA), Princeton University Library (USA), Museo San Telmo (Spain), The National Library of Greece (Athens), VOID (Athens) etc - amongst others.
He is represented by Galerie S. in Paris.
E: olipinfatphotos (AT) gmail.com
IG: @olivier_pinfat
Born in December 1969 - Norfolk, UK.
Lives in Italy.