Pierrick Sorin FR
Tricks and Deceptions
Video installation
November 7 through January 30, 2027
, Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Polaris – Art Center
Istres
Free entrance
Vernissage of the exhibition
on Saturday, November 7, at 11 a.m.
Credits
Exhibition produced and conceived by Polaris—art center.
Since the 1990s, Pierrick Sorin has been developing his artistic style through video art. As a proponent of self-filming, he created short skits in which he starred with great humor, set against backdrops cobbled together from real and fictional objects. Over time, his works have taken various forms: short films, visual installations, and holographic displays, also known as optical theaters.
The artist takes on every role, with humor and derision; he embodies all the characters in his work—rather clumsy, awkward, or shy beings whose gestures evoke the world of slapstick cinema. A poetry of illusion, rooted in the legacy of Georges Méliès and Jacques Tati, that gently and ironically questions the process of constructing the images presented and their validity.
Faced with the complexity of the world, Pierrick Sorin veers toward an absurd world—one that is both serious and funny—and uses humor to question both the foundations of an artistic approach and the human condition. An intimate and comical work that challenges our perspectives and perceptions.
Tours and Workshops Offered by Polaris
- Tours open to the general public on Friday, December 11, and Friday, January 22, at 2:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.
- Free tours are available by reservation and for groups of more than 8 people; please call 04 42 55 17 10.
Pierrick Sorin
A videographer, set designer, and director, Pierrick Sorin creates work that explores the nature of the image, while viewing video as a potential extension of the realm of painting.
After graduating from the Nantes School of Fine Arts in 1988, he began creating burlesque self-portraits on Super 8 film. His work, which blurs the lines between reality and fiction, quickly gained attention and was featured in numerous exhibitions in France and abroad. The advent of video and later digital tools allowed him to expand his artistic practice. Through short skits depicting the minor catastrophes of everyday life, his humor-laced work also profoundly challenges our fascination with the visual and our passive consumption of images. Almost all of his works engage the viewer or, without their knowledge, draw them into the heart of the installation. In 1995, he created his first installation using a holographic system that allowed him to incorporate a character moving within a real setting. Starting in 2006, he began staging operas, always using video and visual effects. In 2009, he created a play titled 10:13 p.m. The Fernand Léger National Museum in Biot and the Nantes Museum of Art each dedicated an exhibition to him in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
For the opening of its new spaces on Boulevard Raspail, the Fondation Cartier commissioned in 1994 *The Battle of the Pies*, a performance in which Pierrick Sorin portrays himself as “a character violently attacked by pie-throwers who runs from one screen to another with no real way to escape.” Violent energy, the energy of desire condensed into a fraction of a second—the pie exploding on the flesh—and, all jumbled together, ideas from painting (overlay, color), war art (the painted body), sculpture (the body reshaped by pastry cream), and cinema (Muybridge’s body in motion, rendered in a burlesque style) …” In 2001, the Fondation Cartier invited him to design an exhibition that he conceived as a total work of art: self-portraits and the multiplication of identities, three-dimensional images and the total occupation of space, the installation of devices for presenting video images, and the revelation of all their special effects. The works on display join the three works already in the collection: *La Bataille des Tartes* ( 1994), *La Belle peinture est derrière nous* (1989), and *Projections* (1997).