Ernest Pignon Ernest

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Ernest Pignon Ernest

 

 

I am not a writer or a journalist; neither am I a man who walks into art galleries and spends hours trying to understand what the thoughts of the artist were. I am someone who looks and sees. We live in a world of fleeting glimpses and most people I know have forgotten how to look. Why? Because I believe deep in my soul that if you want to have a visual experience of art, suffering and inspiration, then the work of Ernest Pignon-Ernest is a good place to start.

 

Born in Nice in 1942, Ernest-Pignon is a self-taught visual artist. He changed his name so as not to be confused with the painter Edouard Pignon. Much of his work is political and social, embracing topics such as apartheid, AIDS and nuclear weapons.

 

Acquaintances of mine refuse to look further than this so miss seeing his work, but there is poetry and humour and unlike many of the current contemporary artists he takes a position; and just to shock you all, he really can draw. Some would say that Ernest Pignon-Ernest invented street art. I don’t believe this. He is an urban artist who uses his surroundings as a canvas, whereas street art is an expression placed into surroundings.

I have read that he has a formula for his installations or as I continue to see them: ‘Urban Interventions’. He chooses a town, sometimes of his own volition and sometimes just by chance. From there he explores; day and night he walks the streets. He soaks himself with the noises, colours and materials around him. Then he immerses himself in books and all the information he can find on his chosen place. He develops his work by drawing on newspaper or other media using charcoal or black chalk. He has been quoted as saying he likes the fragility of paper.

 

He puts his work up at night if he’s able, the artwork more illuminating as it is reveals itself in the emerging dawn; pasting it on a wall, a telephone booth, a church, in whatever location he has chosen as his canvas. Over time the images start to disintegrate, they are left to the elements, the pollution, the weather, the workings of a city; he never signs them: "…their degradation also contains meaning…”

 

Pignon-Ernest began by making architectural drawings. He was a great admirer of Picasso, but realized he could not follow in his footsteps; they had to be his own. He later participated in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture. His involvement there coincides with the first time he put his work outside. In 1966, Pignon-Ernest created his first major works as a conscious statement against France’s nuclear capabilities in Provence. Deeply moved by the silhouettes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he created collages of the shadows.

 

In the ‘70s he made a series of political works under the title: 1971, ‘The Commune’, a series of works situated around Paris including the steps of the Sacré-Coeur. In 1974 he displayed “Nice Twin-Cape Town”, through which he took a stand against the twinning of the two cities during apartheid. He also created the installations ‘Immigrants’ (1975) and ‘Evictions’ (1979). 

 

Some say his best work was in Naples, where his works are complex, yet free. He pays a passing salute to the 17th century and to Caravaggio, Virgil and Pompeii; and as if to prove the point he visited there four times over a seven or eight year period. "It feels, he says, that I cherished Naples, I know the walls of Naples, texture, to the fingertips…”

 

Later, an artistic journey to Soweto materialized arguably one of the most iconic pieces that Ernest Pignon-Ernest has produced, that of a woman carrying a man, a victim of the AIDS epidemic, the inspiration taken from a powerful photograph of a man carrying the body of a young child who had been killed by the police.

 

By substituting the father for a woman, he highlights how in reality it is women who bear the brunt of this ‘war’; and by substituting the child he conveyed the desperate need to fight an enemy that had no respect for colour, age or gender.

 

I read about Pignon-Ernest’s time in Palestine where he created works in response to his friend’s death, and was struck by a single line quoted by him: “I do not work in situations, I try to work situations.”

 

In the galleries and museums which exhibit his work, whatever the space, it holds its own; but the soul and basis of his work is in the outdoors where his canvas is the city, the people and his thoughts.