The French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest in Tuscany for two days of events, screenings and an exhibition

The great French artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest, pioneer of urban artarrives in Tuscany for two days of meetings, screenings and an exhibition: on April 22nd in Florence and April 23rd in Certaldo, thanks to the project “Wails” designed by Lorenzo Zambini, Stelleconfuse and the Sikozel Collective to remember his historic intervention artistic in Certaldo in September 1980.

Monday 22 April at 6pm cinema The Company of Florence a screening of the documentary film will be held “If I come back” of the Sikozel Collective (free entry while places last). What did we do with his death? 40 years after the assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest embarks on a journey to Italy to ask this question about the places of the poet’s life, work and death. In Rome, Matera and Naples, the artist questions inhabitants and passers-by pasting on the walls an image drawn in black stone, a secular piety in which Pasolini carries his own lifeless body in his arms.

After the screening the meeting with Ernest Pignon-Ernest will follow focused on his work urban art and on the figure of Pier Paolo Pasolini, to which Ernest Pignon-Ernest has dedicated many works and reflections of his artistic activity over the years.

Tuesday 23 April, at 5.30 pm at the Church of Saints Thomas and Prospero in Certaldo a public meeting will be held between Ernest Pignon-Ernest and the community of Certaldowith interventions by people from Certaldo who witnessed his intervention in September 1980.

It will then be inaugurated in Praetorian Palace the exhibition “Ernest Pignon-Ernest / Certaldo 1980” which will be open from April 23rd to June 23rd. The exhibition is made up of a collection of photographs, documents, fragments and a video testimony of the artist (made by the Sikozel Collective). The exhibition itinerary takes us back to Certaldo September 1980, within the exhibition-action entitled “The natural and the human”coordinated by the art critic Antonio Del Guercio. On that occasion Ernest Pignon-Ernest created a speech entitled “Many men and women came to Certaldo”, pasting many giant silk-screen prints in various places in the city.

His works are the result of the relationship between different elements: the image glued in a place, the place where it is inserted, the moment in which it appears and the time in which it disappears and finally the “spectator”, the passer-by who relates to it. To understand the rich range of meanings it is necessary to pay attention to each of these aspects, because, as we will see, the work of art cannot do without any of them.

“Having Ernest Pignon-Ernest in Tuscany is a unique opportunity. We’re talking about an artist who started making works on the street in the 1960s, all the same Banksy he says that in France Ernest-Pignon did these things thirty years before him. For the artist JR he is a constant source of inspiration, even Francis Bacon followed his work from the beginning. I invite everyone not to miss this opportunity to meet one of the protagonists of contemporary art” the organizers said.

“Ernest Pignon-Ernest will arrive directly from Venice, where he will have inaugurated his exhibition “Je Est Un Autre” at the Espace Louis Vuitton, collateral event at the Venice Biennale. It will be exciting to bring him back 44 years later to Certaldo, the scene of one of his first urban artistic interventions that invaded the streets of the city, demonstrating how the existence of a work is not in its physical existence, but in the traces it leaves and in the its deep roots. Fundamental to the creation of the documentary exhibition at Palazzo Pretorio was the contribution of Ernest Pignon-Ernest in giving us the opportunity to open and use his photographic archive, catapulting us to Certaldo in September 1980″ continued Lorenzo Zambini, director of ZAP and co-creator of the Wails project.

Ernest Pignon-Ernest

Ernest Pignon-Ernest pioneer of urban art

Ernest Pignon-Ernest is a French artist, born in Nice in 1942. His artistic research investigates the memories of placeswhich the artist evocatively evokes through site-specific installations of drawings and silk-screen prints. His predilection for creating works with a strong connection with the place of destination, political, cultural and social commitment demonstrated in his work, in addition to a situationist and unsettling approach to his ephemeral installations, make Ernest Pignon-Ernest today considered among the precursors of art urban.

The first project on the street dates back to 1966 and concerns the realization on theAlbion plateau of a series of stencils depicting victims of the Hiroshima nuclear disasterin critical response to the creation of a nuclear missile launch base in the area.

The profound connection between work and context from this moment becomes fundamental for Ernest Pignon-Ernest, who he rejects the institutional system to express himself directly in the places of inspiration.

Subsequent projects were also born in this spirit, such as the large display of serigraphs created on the occasion of centenary of the Parisian Commune (1971) or in the works created in 1980 in Certaldo in homage to Boccaccio and Pasolini.

He also dedicated it to the Italian intellectual in 2015 a series of serigraphs affixed in places of Pasolini’s memory which portray him in a Pietà. The interest in Italian and Mediterranean culture leads the artist to undertake numerous trips, including a stay in Naples between 1988 and 1995, where he created several posters inspired by Caravaggio and Neapolitan baroque painting.

Certaldo 1980 _ Ernest 1