Who are they? How many of them are there? And what exactly are they trying to achieve? Nothing good, if we judge them by the cruelty of the emblems decorating their lair, still warm from their presence.

Check out the guillotine or this tondo in its sadistic re-interpretation of the game of darts or the upside-down trophy: as if sheer iconoclasm wasn’t enough, have they no respect for the hunt? What is the point in having spread terror though the art world under this formidable pseudonym between 1969 and 1990 – pre-empting the artistic collective model with the mini-collective – having perfected dissimulation and its abominable counterpart doubt as an arm against the custodians of artistic values or having, with astonishing clairvoyance, banked on the scene’s paranoia… in order to finally uncover their faces here (If that were all they were showing!) and gather together photographic proof of  their activities. If it’s just a question of being provocative again, at least it’s done with the class of portraits of mafia goons, their guns at rest, posing in their hideout in the deep countryside, sports car parked on the grass; a Citroën 2CV in the colours of their resistance to philosophical speculation (All-over fake red-brick).  These photo-souvenirs of blissful, bucolic times, lived out on the margins of war – those, where one takes an afternoon nap, wanders around naked and feels moved by the wind in the lace curtains – mightn’t they be just so many staged scenes, all part of the same plot? We should take note that the more sophisticated ones are also the most brazen and the elegance of these antique reconstitutions (around a well made of tyres) is only equalled by the way vulgarity is unmasked with such romantic humour.

This confusion only confirms Présence Panchounette’s prescience concerning photography, which when these were taken was undergoing no particular theoretical development. In the city, in the 1970s, they created pastiches of what would happen in the 1980s. In the countryside, they raked over the medium of photography, coming up with a whole range of subjects: the intimate witness, an attribute of self-fiction, the performance photograph, the recording of the present and of history in real-time on the TV set and of course re-photography, with its effect of an image repeated to infinity, of co-existence (Mamie & Mick Jagger¹) and all its consequences on the disappearance of the author.  It is the nature of photography – and of any image concerning desire – to record disappearance; they are fully aware of this in the same way as the African portrait painters, whose naïve paintings are the only serious painting that Présence Panchounette exhibits. Thus these images revealing the supposed truth of Présence Panchounette are filled with absences, in a theatre with all the seats folded away, in empty beds and half-filled glasses.

The most visible absence is that of the hand that arranged these mantelpieces and Formica shelves with their perfect association of leather-bound volumes, miniature spinning wheel, clothes-peg cardholder, photo of a dachshund… all against a background of Toile de Jouy² re-interpreted by Castorama.³ Présence Panchounette have an eye for the future and were able to see the destiny of contemporary art in the “tablescapes” of the famous interior designer David Nightingales Hicks, a pioneer, whose patchwork of disparate styles decorated the living spaces of the 60s jet set; which led to the statement “our first contact with the avant-garde was in the pages of Maison & Jardiin⁴”.  And there’s more; in appearing as plausible displays to the most well-informed eyes concerned with movements in present-day art, these masterpieces of suburban decoration deform the method defined by Hicks, showing that they anticipated their re-appropriation by future pioneers of taste. That’s perhaps what is meant by Le Paradigme de l’Olympia⁵

Julie Portier
(Translation Chris Atkinson)
 

1.Granny & Mick Jagger
2.Fabric with a repeated, generally pastoral theme.
3.French DIY chain.
4.House & Garden magazine
5.The Olympia Paradigm