Although both work on their own artistic creations, David Raffini and Florian Pugnaire regularly co-operate on joint projects. The videos and installations, which they produce, follow a meticulously prepared script whose narrative thread frequently ends in spectacular catastrophes, strong and convincing figures of a poetic metamorphosis.
The exhibition at the national Pablo Picasso museum, La Guerre et la Paix (War and Peace) takes you on an exploration of a totally new production Energie sombre (dark energy) in which a vehicle launched at breakneck speed is subjected to a specific treatment and an astonishing choreography. The car’s frantic race, the transformations that it undergoes, the distortions that it is subjected to, the totally animal-like moult which it achieves leads to a kind of allegory of artistic creation, which to use the same words of Picasso “is a sum of destructions”. Beyond the fictional story and the shock sequences, beyond the vertiginous images and special effects, the video work of Pugnaire and Raffini questions the process even of the creative act for which the tortured vehicle is, in this case, the designated tool.