Having put a UFO in the sky over Rio, Peter Coffin has now landed at Crédac for a solo show featuring installations, photographs, videos, sound pieces and sculptures. In an extension of his usual work, Coffin has carried on with his investigations through different types of phenomena (natural, optical, etc.), offering visitors new ways of seeing and understanding such manifestations, and new means for questioning the subjectivity of science.
The title selected by the artist for his show at Crédac refers to his ideas concerning the experience of movement, color and light. In Italian “qualunque” can mean any, any old, whichever, whatever…
This American artist, who was born in 1972 in Berkeley, California, lives and works in New York. Coffin's art is protean, his interests many and run from science and nature to music and art history. Humor is clearly on display throughout his oeuvre. Tackling serious questions with a detached amusement, the artist highlights a singular form of play that falls between games of logic and games of illusion. Coffin has a penchant for everything that smacks of scientific experimentation and theories dealing with color, light and visual perception.
It was mainly after the discovery of Coffin's Transformation Sculptures in 2008 at London's Barbican Centre that the Crédac became interested in this artist's output, which was very much akin to some of the concerns that were then at work in the Travail de rivière show. Oddly enough, his Transformation Sculptures look like on-site works done for Crédac, which, like the Barbican Centre, is an underground venue marked by a utopian architecture: Chamberlin Powell and Bon for the London site and Jean Renaudie for our venue in Ivry. In this buried space, Transformation Sculptures, ageless, timeless objects, create a kind of archeological fiction, bringing to light the reserves of an imaginary museum. Such notions as the transformation of original forms, repetition, formal or retinal persistence as well as questions about utopias and conservation, all of which run throughout Coffin's work, resonate with the issues that are at the heart of Crédac and its aims. Intellectual joy and research done with a dose of humor, openness to knowledge and a return to experimentation in the experience that is offered to viewers-these are the pillars of Peter Coffin's work, lending a breath of fresh air to artmaking today.
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