Olivier Jonvaux

Film

Pirovano shows a bunch of grapes placed on a table outdoors. This is the central element that defines the film’s circular, repetitive form. Grapes, which have featured prominently in art history and, and particularly in the illustration of mimesis, here become an allegory of atomic matter.
The camera takes the position of specks of dust in the air, swirling near and far around the natural elements. The texture of the wood, of the stone, the sudden movement of a butterfly, the leaves in the wind, are so many clues that stand in contradiction to what we know about the real.
The scales of time and space become sensorial compositions inviting the viewer to awaken her senses of looking and listening. The action unfolds in a bucolic world, in the middle of a meadow, where the temporality that might be defined is still unknown. We do at least understood that we are looking at the codes of romantic representation, as evinced by the play of light and focal lengths.
This work takes its references from the work of poets such as Lucretius and Francis Ponge, the films of Michael Snow, and the cinematic work of Jean-Daniel Pollet.

Olivier Jonvaux

Olivier Jonvaux is an alumnus of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. He has been invited on various residencies and to a number of artistic institutions in France and abroad. His work has been shown at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Saint-Étienne, at Basis Frankfurt, at the Centre Européen d’Actions Artistiques Contemporaines (CEAAC) in Strasbourg, and on the Bazaar Compatible Program in Shanghai. In 2019 he exhibited in the Salon Jeune Création and won the Ateliers d’Art prize awarded by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux. His work spans a number of mediums from sculpture to multimedia, while referring to fields as varied as philosophy and comics.

Production

Credits

Acknowledgments

Melody Raulin, Livia Johann, Ann Stouvenel, Patrick Jonvaux, Alex Pepino, Madeleine Van Doren, Daniel Dobbels, François Bonenfant, Eric Prigent, Cyril Aboucaya, Théodora Barat, Beat Gysin, Andrew Price, Nicolas Bigards, Blandine Paploray, Eric Giraudet de Boudemange, Chloé Belloc, Thomas Léon, Thibaut Rostagnat, Duncan Pinhas, Yves Rousguisto, Guillaume Barth, Cindy Coutant, Olivier Bémer, Ines Sieulle, Julie Vacher, Guangli Liu, Samuel Lecocq, Isabella Hin, Lucie Bercez, Tom Castinel, Octave Rimbert-Rivière, all the team and personnel at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains.