Artpress 389 décembre 2006. Dominique Baqué.

...…( With 6 Streets and 12 Camel Toes, and following his Défilés and Joggers, Frank Perrin pursues a vast and ambitious project entitled Post-Capitalism whose goal is nothing less than the photographic restitution and critique of the modelisations imposed by liberal capitalism and globalised at the moment when Martin Webber was able to identify, justly, the post-city age. Hung on each of two opposing walls are six very large and elongated panoramic photos, of glacial beauty, and on a third wall a multi-panelled work of twelve smaller format images of extremely saturated colors. In the urban panoramic works, a full-frontal view which is systematically taken from the opposite side of the street sets the scene into that of spectacle. Some emblematic signs – Italian neons, a half-timbered house, American flags, etc - permit one to recognize the country where these massively uniform buildings were photographed, homogenized by the globalisation of the designer label to the point of vertigo, to the point of nausea: Vuitton, Fendi, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Jimmy Choo, Bottega Veneta and an avenue completely consecrated to the sign of Armani in Italy (jeans, profumi, casa, libri, ad nauseum). The panorama without doubt the most chaotic is that of Street 09 Tokyo where the post-modern buildings drawn in de-structured lines and lacking in any reassuring verticality are set directly up against architectural structures of an ordinary geometry. The logo reigns everywhere at the same time as the city shamelessly exhibits the irrefutably triumphant signs of liberal capitalism in its most savage form: as though, henceforth, what makes a city is only its dedication to the mounting of the collossal and to the massive diffusion of signs of merchandise. Also as though, subterfuge were no longer conceivable.



But if the metropolis is thus rendered so dramatically uniform – even worse, alienated in some manner – the body, and even more so the feminine body, also sees itself incongruously formatted, as seems to be signified by the multi-panel work “Camel Toes,” as this slightly vulgar expression indicates, notably through the internet and thanks to tightly clinging clothing for women. Then a surprising fresco of woman’s crotches sheathed in clingy lycra, either shiny or mat, always excessively colorful, and sometimes printed with a leopard pattern, or even from these unlikely lizard-skin trousers the very worst of disco connotations. Orange, green, fuschia and purple fuse to attract and exhaust the gaze although, paradoxically, they do not excite. Sex is barely brought forward, and these “cut” bodies, segmented from the belly to the upper thighs, appear more and more like the casts of annonymous sillouettes, and as though made frigid by the material. In this way, via long panoramics consecrated to the rise of brand labels and via the close-up zoom upon the most sexualized part of the body but from which, quite precisely, the erotic potential has been withdrawn, the dialectic of the gaze and of power, between being and having, and in the pitiless triumph accomplished by capitalism and money, is icily played out. ) Dominique Baqué







Art press 328 octobre 2006. Yann Perreau.



Défilés, the recent book by Frank Perrin, begins in this way: “Welcome to ‘Connection City’, Los Angeles, year 00. The city without streets, nor strollers, no possible diversion. The street has been emptied, the passers-by appropriated by the silent running of cars.” The photographer’s last exhibition to date takes just this, the street, as it’s starting point. Section 2 of the series, “Post-capitalism,” presents six panoramic photos of commercial streets which were taken in six great metropolis’ across the world. In this way, one discovers New York’s 5th Avenue with it’s extended views, a boulevard in Tokyo where futurist buildings cohabitate with a zen garden, as well as the almost Stalinist building which houses the Armani boutique in Milan. Each image, a collage of two or three juxtaposed negatives, thus symbolizes one’s own imagination of the city in question and captures the characteristic aura of this or that urban milieu.



What strikes one in these photographs is also the invasion of downtown areas by the numerous boutiques, shops and department stores. Perrin depicts mankind’s condition in the cities of the 21st century in colors, pixels and grains: the stroller, who has become the shopper (with his alter-ego, the jogger, who was the subject of an earlier series). His streets are saturated with advertising banners, eye-catching neon signs and the logos of luxury marks. From the Parisian “passages,” described by Walter Benjamin (much cited by Perrin) and made an urban fact characteristic of modernity, secede the gigantic avenues of Connection City. Thanks to an intelligent hanging, Perrin’s six photographs render the space more square, focused on itself and nearly closed in upon this city of the future: an enormous, chic commercial downtown [the famous “mall” (2)]. Alongside this consumerist series “Post-capitalism,” the series “Camel toes” takes another diverse fact, as amusing as it is significant, as its point of departure: the circulation on the internet of images of womens’ crotches tightly closed into jeans, underwear or trousers which, upon closer examination, sketch the form of a camel’s hoof (“Camel toe”). From the streets to the “Camel toes,” Perrin reconstructs the landscape of a modern shopper. She, the one who comes into the city attempting (without success) to casually stroll, to be seduced by shop windows, to go inside and buy this or that piece of clothing, who ends by “exposing” herself, thanks to the very clothing she is wearing. The photographer explains that the series is concerned with showing how this “homo shoppus” “turns herself into a product as much as an object for exhibition through the clothing she is wearing”. Paradox of post-capitalism: what at one time belonged to the sphere of intimacy, the private (sex), has now become the object of exhibition. We no longer need Gustave Corbet: it suffices to contemplate the ultra-tight castings of “Camel toes” and to acknowledge the amazing success of this idea via the internet, chat rooms and adolescent culture. In the 21st century the origin of the world is no longer painted but rather photographed by each and every one and then exposed on the net (or in this case, the gallery).



For as much as they surf upon the currents of today (sometimes too much so), Frank Perrin’s works constantly interrogate history. In his text Global Walking he cites Baudelaire, Breton and Debord (initiators of urban experimentation) as much as Stanley Brouwn in his promenade through a city which has been promoted to the rank of a work of art. What a great distance between the past and the present, between the better of yesterday (the stroller) and the worse of today (the shopper), which only the photograph, as a dialectical image, can reveal. “The true face of history,” wrote Walter Benjamin, “stretches out at a gallop. We retain the past only as an image which, the moment at which it allows itself to be recognized, throws a light which will never be seen again”. Yann Perreau







Septembre 2006. Daniel Lesbaches. Irrefutable Presences.



Until now, Frank Perrin has constructed his photographic images according to a composition of lines with their trajectories in horizontal or diagonal directions. The model for this came more from film than from photography. Aside from simply capturing the subjects of the photos (streets, catwalk shows, joggers), these images offered pans and tracking shots in immense spaces where tiny figures, like tightrope walkers, drew attention to tensions and directions. His most recent exhibition veers off rather towards verticality and staticness. What is thus added here, in addition to Ruscha-style lateral displacement and Gursky-style spatial completeness, is a detour through detail and static shot, towards a kind of polychrome sculpture and architecture. By way of saturation, the alternation of folds and slits, and the shift from model to modeled, Perrin's photography incorporates Newman's zip and Fontana's cutter on an all over surface of eletric colors.



Confronting his magnificent images of Streets, Perrin's new photos are entitled CamelToes which engage the form of women crotches molded in panties and lycra body stockings, shiny and creased, well suited to revealing a form precisely where much effort has always been made to convince one that there was nothing. These photos have smaller, square format, and are condensed like icons. Over and above the evident differences introduced by this new work, it is not in discord with his existing oeuvres. It shows, first and foremost, the experimental nature of Frank Perrin's photos. Their formal wealth goes hand in hand with the complexity of our world. As we know, his work is composed of not so much series as of "sections" of a vast and highly ambitious project titled "Post-Capitalism". What is here involved is itemizing and exploring, in a plastic way, the new forms which are forever burgeoning around us within a totally renewed conceptual, political, sociological and aesthetic setting. Post-Capitalism is the experience, in one and the same split second, of “the origin of the world” and its luxuriously stuttering temporary end. There is an almost purely visual condition, where the eye endlessly slides along masses and interstices. In such a world (which is ours), the old distinctions between being (être) and seeming (paraître), between truth and simulacrum, no longer have any meaning. Frank Perrin's images identify and record a new state, a novel synthesis taht we might call "seem-being" (parêtre).



What Frank Perrin finds, above all, in our catwalk shows, in our streets, and today, in camel toes, are the models of an art which is absolutely contemporary, an art that no longer unfolds in accordance with the transmission/ transgression dialect peculiar to history and modernity. Within the huge quotation-based system, both drama and jugement-free, in which we live; he shows the omni-dimensional circulation of signs. He does so as a photographer, using all the focal distances and changes of scale and distance dictated by his discoveries. This is where he links up with our fraught quest: in extreme beauty, linking together the scattered and succesive being-theres, and construction irrefutable presences. Daniel Lesbaches





joggers (postcapitalism section 09) défilés (postcapitalism section 07)





Janvier 2005, “Lucy in the Sky...” Daniel Lebard.





Lucy in the sky with diamonds... Like Frank Perrin, the Beatles celebrated any movement that projected being towards the future. Fascinated as they were, like him, by the slow upsurge from nothingness of an unknown silhouette becoming familiar as if by magic. Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, the first person to walk on a podium surveying the whole of humankind after adapting her agate heels to Africa’s rift valley. Lucy and her stubborn, shewolf-like trot through ages and spaces.

Lucy advancing for two million years in an exercise which only lasts a few seconds in the spotlight. The desert-like camber of Lucy’s foot has since been answered by Aphrodite’s spring-like footstep on her green wake of lawn, when it is not turned white by froth...

... and the broken gorse beneath the hysterical strides of people possessed by the full moon.

Into this cosmic world Frank Perrin brings eternal tramplings.

In this intersected gesture of procession and bedazzlement.

The glorious creatures swaying and gliding along the ramps are like divine goddesses flying in the momentum of their robes towards the arms of athletes receiving the amphorae of victory. They remind us that the segments of the limbs of petroglyph hunters are adjusted as if miraculously in the shadow of a graceful creature tumbling down the last marble flagstones of the marathon night.



Lucy again and ever inspiring when her compatriot, barefoot like her, soared, from stride to stride, from the arches of the Coliseum to the arches of space in the incongrous flickering of old-fashioned television sets connected to the world’s end...



... and when the infantry armies of couture henceforth burst across the flat mother-of-pearl screens of Hollywood terraces. Like Helmut Newton, Frank Perrin obliges us to look straight at the definitive truth of a batallion of naked bodies advancing relentlessly towards us, unveiled, to enrol us forever. With an elliptical click, transporting us to the heart of planetary breathing, he lets us understand why it was written that a young man somewhere rummaging through lost ashes, and a model causing a thrill in fashionable rooms, come to be moving about with the same aerial ease. He brings home the obvious fact that any assumed locomotive approach joins up with the sublime. For at the confluence of the physical, the intellectual and the perceptible, it can actually only be aesthetic. Daniel Lebard







Artpress 306 novembre 2004. Dominique Baqué. Isolated heroes.



Focused around two series, one titled Joggers, the other Parades, one might be permitted the thought that, after the now historically outmoded figures of the Baudelairean man who likes crowds, the surrealist walker, and the Benjaminian promenader, Frank Perrin was trying to capture and beat out the tempo of postmodernity, by way of two "ultra-contemporary" methods: the walk--the top model's walk and the jogger's walk. In sumptuous cibachromes plunged into the sublimity of an absolute black, here torn by ceiling spots, there by breaks of clinically white light, models displaying a sculptural beauty, and a sovereign indifference, walk forward, and their anti-naturalist procession--head held high, eyes blank, posture at once stiff and swaying-- unfurls on theatrical podiums, the ultimate variants of the media stage. Spectacularization of the world and widowhood of the spectacle to which one and all consent, fascinated. Whence the echo, as unlikely as it is brimful of meaning, with the joggers who, either alone or in a group, doggedly, absurdly, in public gardens and zones in city outskirts, in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, thrust their way forward, struggling breathless towards a goal that is nothing other than the race itself, with no end purpose other than to obey the health codes of so-called advanced western societies.



The model parades, in the stage-set vacuousness of her narcissim, spectacle-body emblematic of a society that is more spectacular than ever. The jogger runs, in vain when all is said and done, and both end up in a new kind of bodily modelling: "isolated heroes" of contemporary extremes. Dominique Baqué





Septembre 2004. “Parade” Daniel Lesbaches.



In modern art, when an artist was keen to make a radical break with past practices, he often started out by producing lines. From the “canned chance” of Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages—for which he made optional rules for himself—to Manzoni’s “zero, infinite” lines, which identified length and duration, the space that they invited people to cross and the time taken for their making. Some artists have explored the line with their own body. When Vito Acconci was still a poet, he regarded the page as “a model space, an area of performance in miniature”. He shifted in a quite natural way, by way of lines, from poetry to the visual arts. In his “Following Piece”, a parody of shadowing and sleuthing, he followed people at random in the street until they left the public thoroughfare, drawing immaterial and totally haphazard lines in time and space. Richard Long drew “A Line made by Walking”, a line of crushed grass made in a lawn by the artist’s repeated trampling.



When a museum director lends his space to a couturier for his fashion show, perhaps he has these lines in mind. A parade is essentially bodies drawing a back-and-forth line in space, a line turning on itself, repeated, and separated into two halves by a slight variation, left and right, like a hesitation, wavering about the best side to make the walk back on. It is a thin line, surrounded by abysses in which an invisible throng, a dark audience, is hidden. A well-lit line staked out in the darkness. A night landing strip, or runway. A many-coloured body comes to rest on it, stands stockstill at the end of the runway, and walks away before vanishing forever.



The director possibly succumbs to the supreme beauty of the indifference displayed by the fashion model’s parade, looked at by one and all, and looking at no one. And to the thoroughly animal beauty of someone marking out their territory in the ephemeral anonyomous space. Perhaps he envies the show’s perfection of revolving visibility, in which everything is shown twice over, with a slight time lapse between the obverse and the reverse, in such a way that the spectators ideally do not need to move. The way you look at a video. Unless they see fit to meditate, in front of these walking clothes, on the split second of hesitation when the show opens, when the lining is revealed—meditate, too, on the moment when the model walks, when her movement makes the fabric slide over the body wearing it. One day a top model will do what Iggy Pop did. Going beyond the stage, she will carry on her line over the raised hands of the audience. Daniel Lesbaches





Juin 2004, “Joggers on the beach” Daniel Lesbaches.



Everything has to do with cadence. It is a matter of adopting the tempo and scansion which do not lead to trance, but to the gratifying pleasure of repetition. The regular, metronomic beat does away with any fatigue, for it is through this beat that that state where things hold up on their own is possibly reached. Jogging as a Flaubertian ideal of running on nothing, if not for nothing. The race may be invariably dramatic, but jogging knows nothing about narration, the jogger has no role. We are going nowhere, we even go round in circles as we follow the circular avenue, or alternatively we always turn to the left, as in a maze, not to get out of it or explore it, but simply to pass through it. We start here, and stop there, any old where, nothing has happened, we start all over again. In the shift called for by the city, the jogger joins the promenader. This is the hollow degree of promenading, with neither expectation nor curiosity. In the precise place where the promenader places himself in the eye’s secret, in the sort of spying that can only be carried on while walking, on the borderline between movement and motionlessness, the jogger, for his part, displays not his unique dandylike elegance, but his moving transparency. Take a look at a group of joggers: over it reigns an absolute apoliticalness, an apoliticalness by way of resemblance, by way of non-differentiation. Addition of the same. The distinctive features are nothing other than anecdotes, not clues. Beyond this, as in David Hume’s philosophy, the organizing principle is contiguity. Elements co-exist at the same time, in the same place, without interacting otherwise. Jogging is not a discourse, it is a collage. It is also a postcard. As in the Benjamin Biolay song, a diaphanous voice against a background of acoustic guitars whispers: “No mystery/I get the impression I was born yesterday”. The song’s title is “Joggers on the Beach”. It is a tautological title because jogging is what turns cities into immense beaches. This is why the photo records this movement so clearly—a movement that is repeated for ever, and always resembles itself. As in filmic special effects, it is a background which changes when the foreground is marking time. Daniel Lesbaches