SENTIMENTAL VIOLENCE
"I first met Philippe Perrin almost twenty years ago at the Venice Biennale, in the Most Serene Republic’s only nightclub. Philippe laid into me, made me dizzy with his words, lauded me, criticized me, gave me a friendly pat on the back, then a clumsy one, accidentally punched me and went completely over the top in his apologies to be sure I’d pardon him explicitly. That’s when I started to look at what this troublesome, impetuous artist had to offer. I found out that he was fascinated by images of scoundrels. He wanted to love them and to find them beautiful, and his art was intended to reveal the ostentatious style of the young man gone to the bad. Unafraid of falling into cliché, his images are intended to evoke hackneyed, inevitable scenarios. To make his sympathy for his heroes perfectly clear, he decided to embody them and, like a B-movie actor, he humorously and empathetically personifies them, plays their parts, and believes in them. And he does achieve his aims: we end up liking a two-bit boxer, and we’re ready to follow the adventures of the intrepid cartoon hero Starkiller, a kind of James Bond without the façade of the law to hide behind. Philippe Perrin. He even persuaded me to design a house for his super-baddie: a 400 metre-long folly in the open sea, capable of being either accessed or instantly evacuated by ‘1000 horsepower cigarette boat’, by helicopter, or by personal submarine, no less…
Philippe’s fascination for evil characters and signs was to grow, embellishing the walls of all manner of art festivals. Photography tells stories, but it also tells us about objects, always on the lookout for a brutal narrative shortcut, a visual click that might be the beginning or the end of a tale. Philippe has always been addicted to excess: the calibres of guns went from millimetres to metres; instead of intimidating players round a poker table, knives are stuck into Riviera poolsides; knuckledusters are big enough to be used as slave collars for Siamese quins; Mesrine’s bullet-ridden BMW is glamourized and cloned, a memorial that reminds us that the French police has a clear opinion on the saying ‘the end justifies the means’; a gram of coke becomes a kilogram, and the stainless steel Gillette blade stuck into it for eternity makes it into a monument to junkies; and the crown of thorns, more than ever an instrument of torture, recalls the ordeal of the most famous outlaw of them all…
Don’t go thinking that these instruments of violence have become inoffensive by being made more permanent; it’s just that their target has changed: they now aim straight for the heart."
Jean Nouvel