Pierre Tournier

Pierre Tournier or the luminous flights of a night bird

It is around the age of seventeen that Pierre Tournier discovers and defines the language and materials of his unique art. He has since remained faithful to his approach, which, more than thirty years later, has not yet exhausted its wealth.

Painting and photography are the basic ingredients of his technique, which projects them into space with a simple magic lantern. By practising this extension of the two-dimensional graphic support to a world in volume sculpted by light, our man goes from being a painter/photographer to being an architect whose argument would be light. Its manipulations are able to change the appearance of a place in a flash to the point of making it unrecognizable even to those who are familiar with it. A system of hiding the lens of the lantern manipulated by the artist's hand allows the rhythmic sequence of the projection of images that adds an inimitable touch of life to the machine's programmed inertia. This is what Pierre Tournier calls his "pictorial percussions".

During a peregrination in Spain in the early nineties, the artist decided to combine his art with the search for electronic music because he perceived it as capable of communicating an impulse to his visual creation and incarnating itself in it. This trans-sensory experience from ear to eye and vice versa is without recalling the concerns of the psychedelic current.

From Pierre Shaeffer's research to the trends of the techno movement, the sparkling of hip-hop, Pierre Tournier is certainly an artist of his time. Its field of operation is that of artificial light of industrial night and performance. This explains why he naturally became a scenographer/decorator and works with dancers and poets. His remarkable series of 17 portraits of choreographers is one of the highlights of his production.

He publishes works on a wide variety of materials and formats. Born of movement, they constitute the still quivering trace of the whirlwind of unique moments whose echo goes back to the eye of the spectator transformed into a contemplator of a world that has once again become silent.

- Jules Merleau-Ponty