DANS L'ESPACE PUBLIC, ORDRE OU DESOBEISSANCE ?

Designer-graphiste pendant plus de trente ans, après des études de philosophie et de mathématiques, Pippo Lionni se consacre désormais à la peinture et à la vidéo. Ses films d’animation sont projetés dans l’espace public des grandes capitales. Ils mettent en relief l’ambiguïté de nos mouvements engagés dans l’ordonnance ou la désobéissance.

Si ce designer s’investit totalement dans l’art, c’est parce qu’il ne sert à rien d’autre qu’à remettre les choses en question et parce que « Le design était beaucoup plus intéressant quand il n’était pas à la mode. L’art ne sert à rien donc sert à tout ! ». Pour l’essentiel, son travail est une recherche de sens. Il est intéressé par le conflit et l’hypocrisie. Pippo Lionni est profondément un homme de la ville, cette « zone d’intensité », « lieu des contradictions ». La ville le stimule par la confrontation qu’elle révèle entre l’organisé et le non-organisé. Cela l’incite à jouer avec la signalétique, couramment utilisée en milieu urbain. Ses vidéos s’inscrivent dans le prolongement de son travail graphique sur les Facts of life qu’il poursuit depuis 1998. Il interpelle notre perception grâce au détournement de pictogrammes, une satire du fait social. Il traite de la frénésie, du non-dit et de la pauvreté, cela d’une manière positive et critique. « Chercher des solutions fait partie de la vie humaine et cela passe, entre autres, par le design. Les master-plans apportent-ils pour autant des solutions ? Je ne crois pas. »

Parmi la vingtaine de films d’animation qu’il a réalisés, certains ont été présentés en 2010 à Amsterdam (Caszuidas, en 2010), en septembre 2011 à New-York (en septembre sur The big screen Plaza à Chelsea), ainsi qu’à Melbourne. Le dernier, en cours d’élaboration, est sur le thème des réfugiés. La ville défend son plan mais les gens bougent. L’immigration vient perturber la rationalisation de la vie occidentale : elle apporte de la diversification et donc de la richesse ».

L’animation est un moyen de jouer sur la dualité entre abstraction et réalité fictive, car « avec l’animation, on se demande toujours « what’s happen next ?». L’ambiguïté de ses vidéos apparaît nettement lorsqu’elles sont confrontées à l’espace public, et non plus seulement exposées dans les lieux attendus de l’art contemporain. « J’utilise des signes évidents pour évoquer des choses qui ne sont pas évidentes ». La ville s’affichant comme l’empire des signes. Et puisque la ville s’offre à tous, l’art exposé vient questionner les badauds sur le sens profond de la ville durable en soulevant ces questions : « Comment considérer la vie sur la surface de la terre et quelles sont les relations entre les êtres humains ? »

En 2010, le film Freneticology, était réalisé à partir de codes informatiques pour une création aléatoire sur le thème des comportements. « Dans toute situation, c’est l’élément perturbateur non-maîtrisable qui créé de l’intérêt ».

Les Facts of life ont été également déclinés sous la forme de badges. « Ce medium est intéressant car il est anti-écran, pas cher, accessible à tous, très fort et très urbain. Il délivre un message à travers une image statique. Le porter est d’une certaine manière un acte de désobéissance ».Toutes ses productions autour du signe nous incitent à réfléchir et à ne plus être seulement qu’un réceptacle à images.

Les espaces urbains qu’il affectionne particulièrement sont les moins aménagés. Ayant passé son enfance à New-York, le bâti abandonné ou détourné fait partie de sa culture. Grand marcheur, il considère aujourd’hui que « Paris est une ville assiégée par la frénésie du transport individuel, comme le portable (beaucoup de blah blah pour très peu de communication). Le plus vite ne correspondant pas forcément a plus de biens… Reste à savoir quand la ville se retrouve totalement saturée ! ». Et lorsque Pippo Lionni quitte Paris ou New-York, il recherche des paysages où l’intensité se montre aussi présente : sur les océans ou au cœur des montagnes.

Carine Merlino, Mook La Ville créatrice de ressources, Editions Autrement, Novembre 2011

RE-ANIMATION

Pippo Lionni has been showing his « Facts of Life » series since 1998. Whatever the medium, a collection of small fluorescent booklets, installations in art galleries, prints and animations, he operates a “reappropriation” in the use of pictograms, bringing them to life through a critical satire of our social existence. By means of an unceasing narrative and playful coming and going, his use of animation offers a new level of comprehension. « I usually work on site-specific installations modulating the temporality of confrontation in a given context. I use animation as a means to play with the duality between the abstract and figurative. From a distance one perceives a visual dynamic of moving forms; when up close, one deciphers the autonomous life cycle of the symbols, dependent on random, combinational and organic algorithms. This time/distance relation confers a new dimension to the « Facts of Life » series. With animation, one always wonders, « what is next? » says Lionni.

What else can these pictograms reveal? As a universal and normalized form of language, they land mark our daily life – to be perceived and understood by all without ambiguity. Representing the power of symbolic language, they are a schematic graphical representation, a stylized figurative drawing, functioning like a written sign language, which cannot be transcribed into oral language. Usually used in public signage, they are an alternative to multilingual text to describe a situation, to prescribe a particular behaviour or indicate potential danger. These symbols are published in the « Journal Officiel » as regulation. This visual language, which normally contributes to pragmatic submissiveness, is suddenly disrupted and makes apparent “the obvious” through carefully chosen stereotypes, and thus addresses diversity and enigma. As a graphic and industrial Designer, Pippo Lionni masters the tools and methods of communication in the framework of commissioned projects. As an Artist, Lionni plays with these tools and creates his body of work as a parallel universe, populated with signs and shapes and articulated by a two layered grammar, which cleverly takes us into his own repertoire of semiotics by a mirror effect.

Pippo Lionni scores a bull’s eye with the screening in Amsterdam, as his work finds its way back to the general public. Beyond moving the exhibition into a non-art context, the selection of Lionni’s 8 animations could well make everything tip-over. The Artist has his back against the wall. Which of the two will take over, the graphic Designer or the visual Arts Artist? Re-animation… to be re-animated is to be between life and death, at the doors of the purgatory, asking for a second chance, a second life. These animations are subject to traditional commercial programming, to the randomness of passers-by, to the uncertainty of life. If placed in the usual exhibition spaces of Contemporary Art, the shift would happen naturally, but confronted to public space, ambiguity shows its face… Finally! To the duality of his nature of being both a visual Artist and a graphic Designer, echoes a dialectic which confronts abstraction and figuration, macro and microcosm, identity and otherness, innate and acquired, passivity and activism, determinism and free will, commissioned and freely created work... Following the example of Hegel for whom “something is living insofar as it contains contradiction, which provides it with self-movement », Lionni is somewhat provocative, using the opponent’s weapons to destroy an undetermined, « thus perverted » thought generating bomb. Operating as an anti- propaganda act at the heart of the city, this Re-animation makes the political beat of his Art even stronger.

Whilst playing with the reversible aspect of images and the polysemy of these “ready-made” codes, he calls for introspection, for an ode to human condition and places himself as an Artist of truth –may it be Hegelian-, in the form of a cerebral pirouette. Not so distant from Street Art motivations and objectives, Pippo Lionni calls out to “Find the truth that lies within our-selves!”

(1. Official government publication of laws and regulations.)

Sarah Carrière-Chardon, curator & editor, contact@sarahcc.com, 2009



LA NORMALITÉ MISE À MAL

Outils de communication censés dicter les règles et usages de notre société, les codes de l’artiste Pippo Lionni – symboles signalétiques pour la plupart – nous proposent une relecture du monde qui nous entoure. Chargés d’humour caustique, d’émotion, de poésie, ils poussent à la réflexion ou à la dissidence. Mieux, ils confèrent à l’espaceplan de nouvelles dimensions.

À peine assis, Pippo Lionni – artiste d’origine new-yorkaise installé en France depuis plus de quinze ans – se lance avec passion dans un monologue, préambule à une discussion de fond sur la signalétique et le sens caché des installations qu’il met en scène. « La richesse et l’ambiguïté des pictogrammes et des idéogrammes, constituent la base d’un langage abstrait. Aussi, je m’attache à les faire cohabiter, à confronter des signes pour donner naissance à un discours symbolique », dit-il.

Exposant dans des galeries ou musées autant qu’il intervient dans des livres, Pippo joue avec ses pictogrammes pour mieux interpeller le visiteur : « Ils symbolisent l’être dans sa plus simple expression, ainsi chacun peut s’y identifier. » Dans l’installation intitulée AWOL – Absent WithOut Leave, autrement dit « déserteur » –, des personnages aux contours robotiques gisent sur le sol. Mise en place chez ArtCurial pendant les premières semaines de la guerre du Golfe, elle imposait au visiteur d’enjamber, de piétiner les morts pour accéder à la salle des ventes. Mis en regard d’une situation géopolitique complexe, le pictogramme prenait un sens nouveau : « Le pictogramme est un porte-parole idéal car chacun de ces êtres stylisés, réduits à leur plus simple contour, nous ressemble : le Robot suggère notre fascination pour l’automatisation ; le Pixel, la virtualisation ; le Fragment, notre autodestruction. Ce faisant, ils traduisent une nouvelle relation à l’espace : une projection de soi, avec force et émotion. Comme s’il était donné au spectateur de se confondre avec l’espace-plan, de s’y plonger corps et âme », explique-t-il.

Une rencontre avec l’oeuvre de Pippo Lionni ne peut donc qu’être frontale, et engendrer des espaces intérieurs pluridimensionnels. Et c’est précisément ce pour quoi l’on fait appel à lui : « On me demande de créer des oeuvres spécifiques, qui s’adaptent à des lieux atypiques et les révèlent. Dans certains cas, il s’agit d’imaginer un usage contre-fonctionnel ; de contrebalancer la normalité, afin de créer du sens, un événement inattendu. Je travaille sur la mise en relation entre des signes, symboles et abstractions qui cherchent la limite entre l’évidence et la non-évidence. Si toutes mes oeuvres véhiculent un message politique, social voire géopolitique, elles ne sont pas toujours compréhensibles de prime abord. Tantôt le message est unique, tantôt il est diffus et multiple, lisible sur plusieurs strates. Ce que je cherche avant tout est une confrontation frontale à l’espace, une explosion des dimensions, une recherche de densité et de fragmentation virtuelle du plan. À bien y réfléchir, pourquoi met-on de l’art dans certains espaces ? L’intervention artistique va au-delà de l’espace existant pour lui conférer une nouvelle dimension : la signalétique vient complémenter l’architecture, lui donner une valeur et apporter une orientation à l’espace. » Intarissable sur ce point, il cite l’exemple de l’artiste francoaméricaine Sheila Hicks qui travaille avec les architectes pour tisser et créer des oeuvres textiles sur mesure. Et d’ajouter : « Les architectes prétendent créer l’espace ; pour autant, quand un artiste vient tordre le cou aux perspectives, créer un conflit spatial, le travail sur les lieux s’en trouve instantanément renforcé. »

Produits en vinyle autocollant, les « Fragments » de Pippo Lionni s’apposent sur un support – mur, carrosserie de voiture, table, tasse, casque de chantier, etc. – comme un gant, une seconde peau. Catalyseurs d’espaces et de dimensions supplémentaires, ils dissèquent le plan, échappent au cadre normé d’une galerie ou d’un lieu de vie. « Quand j’interviens sur un mur, mon oeuvre se confond avec lui : elle s’adapte, se plaque, le recouvre, coule en surface, passe à travers les moulures », précise-t-il. On pourrait même être tenté de dire qu’il le tatoue sans limite, à l’aide d’aplats anguleux, de couleurs vives et criardes, presque brutales. Se pose alors la question de l’élément décoratif : l’artiste tiendrait-il un discours de décorateur d’intérieur ? « Il ne s’agit pas de cohérence ici mais au contraire de tenir une position subversive. J’assume la radicalité de mes installations, dans le fond comme dans la forme. Dans « Fragmenta », la superposition de couches permet de manipuler la surface : il n’existe aucun point de focalisation à part entière, mais quand on se laisse aller et plonger dans l’oeuvre, c’est un paysage abstrait qui s’ouvre. In fine, on n’est pas confronté à un objet mais à son propre cheminement personnel : chacun cherche une association, une identification possible qui lui permettrait de traverser la surface, de suivre son éclatement, de sonder une nouvelle dimension. Et de conclure, le principe est similaire avec la vidéo : la projection d’un film d’animation vient ajouter une couche à notre perception de l’espace. Surface non cadrée, elle permet de porter un regard détaché (critique ?) sur la structure porteuse. De facto, il naît comme un décalage entre la forme et le fond, propice à l’introspection. Je virtualise l’espace ; je crée du mouvement, de la fluidité sur une surface plane et rigide. Je ramène de la vie là où il n’y en avait plus.»

Propos recueillis par Marie Le Fort, 12/2007



FACTS OF LIFE 5

Pippo Lionni's “Facts of Afterlife” just doesn’t leave one indifferent. The brilliant visual communication in the last 3 volumes caught us off guard, but here, instead of just aggressing us on the surface, we are bombed to the depths of our beings, of our unconscious. The worse part of it is, Pippo Lionni's banalized symbolic language - this designated modality of regulation - pushes us to dimensions charged with caustic humor, emotion, poetry... when it doesn't push us to dissidence. Terribly provoking, ironic and nasty beings reveal distinctly human qualities. As their author contends: "Each of these beings resembles us, The Robot suggesting our fascination for automation, The Pixel, virtualization, and Fragment, our orgasmic tendency toward self destruction. Their demise, their faults is their identity. We are as much the sum of our weaknesses (desire to kill, to play with fire, to destroy our environment, to destroy our selves, to age...) as we are the sum of our attributes (to love, give life, explore, survive, create, to fight for justice...). Like us, they are weak, vulnerable, containing in themselves life experience, subjugated by the trauma of memory. In perpetrating their acts they are the messengers of our history and of our humanity.

So how does one avoid damning this new "Facts of Afterlife,” that throws our weaknesses so blatantly into our faces? How can we avoid being seduced when they are so embellished? It’s all contradiction, the rational becomes crazy, our perfect world falls apart, and the cruel becomes tender. Immorality becomes touching, the destroyed becomes aesthetic, and the impure mutate turns into a new beast – accumulators of defect who resemble us, undermining our syrupy hopes and dreams of a better world. How can one bear that this "after apocalypse" doesn't give us a chance for redemption, no hope of improvement? We realize that this "end of the world" is here to stay, forever. That these scenes, portrayed as in the grand tradition, mark the aesthetic ecstasy of battle, that they are treated with the simple monochrome graphics, void of brush stroke or sweat is revolting. How can such emotion emanate from these simplistic beings, from these pencil-less drawings? Some of those drawings, so heavily loaded, infested with lost creatures, dismembered puppets, monsters from hell, risk reminding us of a "Last Judgment", domain where only masters such as Jerome Bosch have dared to tread.

So who does Pippo Lionni think he is? What right does he have to flirt with such a slippery thing as human representation, without the corniness (of many of his contemporaries), or superficial vulgarity (of advertising)? In his own words, “in adding detail, we explode the absolute divinity of the archetypal superheroes, like all of us, gain humanity through idiosyncrasy. And in the process of humanization the icon looses all its force of suggestion. And maybe, this is exactly what Pippo Lionni is doing: he points his finger and hits the bull’s-eye.

Anne Ferrer, Paris, 2006



FACTS OF LIFE 4

In his Facts of Life series, Pippo Lionni has created a repertoire of graphic icons to visually address subjects ranging from the most specific – you are what you watch on television – to the most universal – life and death, love and hate. His ability to go back and forth between the two frames of reference is sometimes startling, often funny, occasionally mind-shattering. The deceptively-simple “headball” in Facts of Life – 4 is both specific and universal at once: an iconic headless white figure, who is kicking his detached soccer-ball-like white head around on the ground, is placed against an abstract black background. The result is an existential conundrum.

Facts of Life – 4 opens with a series of striking mandalas inspired by the daily news. They deftly capture Lionni’s cosmic paradox: how to introduce the jarring realities of modern technological life into Buddhist circular evocations of the universe, the mandala patterns meant to aid meditation? For example, “compheadmanda” masterfully evokes the speed, panic, and heart-breaking destruction of media-dominated mankind whirling around into an eventual Zeus-like unplugging and escape into a transcendent, energized center.

Much less abstract are the tableaux portraying ways that modern man successfully interacts with technology – eating dinner with children wearing headphones, exercising virtually via television, or tossing the laptop in the trash. But when the technology is for waging war, Lionni’s iconic people are victimized, both virtually, via the media, and in reality. In “fleebombs” his running-man icons appear to be ants as they try to evade tiny airborne missiles. There is a foreboding anonymity. In “tanked3head” the heads on Lionni’s basic standing-man icons are being knocked off to bounce like balls along the ground. The size and shape of the symbols is crucial to the feeling of helplessness. Also victimized, but not by war, is the iconic duo (untitled, on pages 108-109) who are gradually obliterated by a dancing rioting crowd invading their space – all of this miraculously accomplished with multiples of only two icons plus a set of parentheses.

Now that Lionni has developed his array of icons beyond the basic man, woman, and child to include robots, pixelmen, fragmen, treeheads, eyeheads, televisionheads, handheads, and cellphoneheads, he is able to put them together into Brueghal-like crowd scenes where they interact and perhaps mutate. The precision of their visual symbolism allows or even demands viewer participation. A large crowd (untitled, pages 130-131), gathered around a mandala-like circle more or less in its center, seems familiar yet strange, with an exhilarating intensity and a sense of the simultaneity of past, present, and future. With Lionni, we don’t know yet if the future will be apocalyptic or ecstatic.

Penny Allen, 2006



A NEW LANGUAGE TO WRITE THE WORLD

If artists have the capacity to reveal the truth, it is through their inventions and transformations. In a world that we perceive more and more as image, reality as an idea has become inseparable from its omnipresent representations.

Pippo Lionni reflects on this state of things, on this endless slippery game of substitutions. His realm is the language of industrial symbols. As icons, humanity is reduced to abstraction : computer icons, digital codes and road signs... In reaction to the standardization of visual messages, he acts as a "sampler" to produce new trajectories for symbolization that determine the modality of our contemporary lives. Through quotation, association, opposition, recuperation, and never ever being satisfied with a unique interpretation, he plays the attraction and repulsion enacted by the "empire des signes". He appropriates a language - while at the same time reinventing it - based on logic of complexity and contradiction. He amplifies or hybridizes the symbols while emptying them of their immediate functionality.

His work could be described as minimalist or conceptual, if there didn't persist a narrative level, literary and critical, a "content" which completes and superposes in a particular way the technique employed. Pippo Lionni fully assumes the role of the artist as storyteller and contrasts the attitude of some of his contemporaries for whom art is a perfect and autonomous object. His work is, as many enigmas, to reestablish the meaning of image. Reassessing, questioning, wrong tracks, dead ends, are the means. Upside down flying men, toppling chairs, a hand on fire - all the laws of nature and the earth's attraction are broken. The objective is not to question the loose of meaning or purpose in our lives, but rather to reveal the obscurity that prevents us from seeing the truths in front of our eyes.

For him the aim is not to represent but to reorganize the world, and to discover new angles of approach. His pictograms illustrate, often with humor, sometimes with violence, what speech could only assess, limit, soften. If the first volume of "Facts of life" establishes the bases of his artistic vocabulary, the second proved the efficiency of his system. The third "Facts of life" shows how the artist's language has become affirmative and his attitude radical. Tackling more complex themes, pictograms are as many slogans, furtive signs, urges, desires or repression.

He acts more and more as an activist in the image war. His latest works, shown at the Galerie Frédéric Giroux, in the exhibition "Primetime" in June 2002, question in a frontal and brutal way the perverted effects of standardization of media images. The recent pieces offer oppositions, constant gaps between the signifier and the significant, fiction and reality. Thus setting out to highlight in a critical and incisive way this "ambiguous period of social communication history on the so-called generalization where media circulation of ideas and opinions, generally conceals the worst manipulations and underground existence of directive speeches."* On one exhibition wall "Primetime - Fuck me" is the image of a family, lazing at the dinner table, watching animated images of a couple making love on the tube. The same device is used in "Primetime - Kill me", but this time, it is the couple making love who watches a man being stabbed. Our relation to reality is endlessly disrupted by the reversibility of visual exchanges.

The work titled "Rape" symbolizes a woman whose body bears handprints. If the title were not so explicit, how would we interpret it? The hand is also a symbol for peace, the means of a caress? In "The name of God 1 and 2", the attacker is at the same time the aggressed. The artist likes to foil ready-made codes and reminds us of the plurality of meaning... titles and symbols rebounding off each other creating new connotations.

The book is a supplementary element that serves to weave meaning through installations. "Primetime" and "Facts of Life 3" show the changing complexity of an artist who, moving from one support to another, wants to shake up the world so as to draw a map of desire, to diversify identities and to increase aesthetic and existential interactions.

Whatever the medium: book, photography, installation, video... his work acts upon our faculty of representation in endless pursuit of analogy and of connection, but also upon our mental, physical and spatial perception. They explore our most intimate dimensions of the human psyche, the notions of impulses, and claim reversibility between horror and ecstasy, between violence and eroticism.

Rooted in his critical vision of reality, he accentuates, plays with and reveals hidden meaning. As such, the artistic product becomes a liberator. He ironically denounces intolerable social situations, narrow thinking and hypocrisy through the use of eloquent metaphors about any form of arbitrary conditioning which regulate our lives.

"Facts of Life" insists on the inefficiency and inaptitude of existing systems to discern the elusive "essence of existence ". Their portrayal of the human condition is scathing but not without humor.

Pippo Lionni reminds us that if art is a dispenser of emotions it is not least language and thought.

*Paul Ardenne in ? l'image corps, figures de l'humain dans l'art du XXe siècle ?, Ed. du Regard, Paris, 2001 p.377

Samantha Barroero, Paris, May 30, 2002



STUDIED PHILOSOPHY AND MATHEMATICS

Studied Philosophy and Mathematics at Portland State University and New York University. Using the universal and symbolic language of pictograms, Pippo Lionni portrays life. Through this abrupt and minimal universe, the artist shows us a mirror of the human condition. However, this political and critical work is also a humoristic vision of contemporary society. The graphic simplicity of this visual language is open-ended - leaving the spectator's imagination free to construct while never indifferent. The pieces are made of big rectangular steel plates on which pictograms play, fight and embrace, and from which emerges the essential meaning. The artist sometimes uses walls or ceilings - the pictograms then occupy the space, as if escaped from materiality. Those big installations give a physical and tangible dimension to the work.

Frédéric Giroux, 2001



...IN HIS NEW BOOK

... In his new book, Pippo went all the way - he invented a new language made of pictograms and articulates it to express the human condition. Never again will pictograms be the same for me. Now they belong to an expressed language that tells us of human relations. Now pictograms think, behave, live, love, lie and die. It reminds me of the Egyptians, with a codified set of symbols, figures, and signs to become a narrative. What I love the most in this book is the invention of a new way of telling stories to a world that is fundamentally visual, by using very well known signs and charging them with new meanings and associations - suddenly making them alive. I love them - I suddenly want them to have a name, or perhaps they should not since they are universal, above and beyond races, nationalities and context. I love the page full of question and exclamation marks, a beautiful synthesis of what life is all about, with the old pictogram fellow, cane in hand exiting from it. Or the joyful pictogram of lovemaking, the best ever done for such an intimate act.

In this book Pippo Lionni has been able to put together not only his past, but his future as well. I think the characters of the pictograms are forever and can forever articulate the aspects of the human comedy as it unrolls through time.

No longer abstractions from the Department of Transportation, these pictograms are living entities - they are us, are me, with all my doubts, my anguishes, my dreams, my fears and indeed all my joy. Pippo, thank you for having discovered us in those pictograms along the alienating corridors of endless airports and having transformed them into human beings with hearts, love, sex and babies, and an infinite desire to tell stories.

Massimo Vignelli, New York, 20/1/99