Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini: Show Me
http://letrangere.net/exhibition/florian-pugnaire-and-david-raffini/
l’étrangère is pleased to present an exhibition of recent film and sculptural work by French artists Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini. Entitled Show Me it features Expanded Crash (Show Me) (2016), along with the award-winning film Dark Energy (2012). Pugnaire and Raffini’s collaborative practice has received international recognition with exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, which holds their work in its collection.
Expanded Crash (Show Me) is a film whose protagonist is the carcass of an Opel-GT that transforms itself into a sculpture. With the help of a device hidden in the passenger compartment, the racing car ‘performs’, comes to life, begins to ‘breath’ then gradually expands, stretches and tears its body. The action references the cult 1983 film by John Carpenter, Christine, in which a classic 1950s car, a Plymouth Fury, turns into a murderous machine with an astonishing ability to self-rebuild. Expanded Crash (Show Me) reverses the process into self-destruction.
The work also refers to the fantasy of the living machine, extremely present in the collective imagination, and records the creation of a sculpture as a residual object with the eerie, apocalyptic atmosphere typical of the artists’ work. The film evokes the end of days, getting progressively more lost in a decaying world full of empty, abandoned buildings, burned carcasses, and darkly worrying landscapes.
