“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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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 artists 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 // represented by L’Agence/Galerie VU (Paris) 1998-2008 // co-founded ‘AM projects’ in 2011 // lives in Italy
Olivier Pin-Fat is working solely in analogue, predominantly through the book medium - handmade or in publishable (trade) formats - and/or with installations.
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. 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 (or tertiary, depending on your point of view) ‘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, out of his control & 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’ or what has emerged out of the wreckage. His edits could therefore easily be described as ‘anti-edits’.
Using an array of different film stocks and printing on silver gelatin fiber base papers only (some also very outdated) what he feasibly can in the darkroom, he creates oftentimes unwieldy photographic media or ‘streams of (un)consciousness’ out of what survives - ultimately of what light and chance has permitted him to.
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 of Botanique (Brussels, 2018), Galerie VU (Paris, 2002), 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 (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, 2023) - to mention a few.
His book MEAT (éd,Void-2018) was a finalist for The Rencontres d’Arles Book Award // Prix du Livre d’Auteur in 2019.
-