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Jean-Michel Pancin

Tout dépendait du temps…
09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Installation — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Jean-Michel Pancin
Cellule 025Lumière series, photograph (2010-2012)
Courtesy of the artist 
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Jean-Michel Pancin
Pelotes
Courtesy of the artist

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Jean-Michel Pancin
Tout dépendait du temps…, installation (2012)
Courtesy of the artist
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre à Toulouse 2012

Jean-Michel Pancin 
Mur des attentes anonymes series (extract)

Courtesy of the artist

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Jean-Michel Pancin
Cellule 138, Lumière series, photograph (2010-2012)
Courtesy of the artist 
Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Jean-Michel Pancin
Cellule 139, Lumière series, photograph (2010-2012)
Courtesy of the artist

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Born 1971 in Avignon. Lives and works in Paris and Avignon.

 

A storyteller in search of research

 

After a career as a top figure skater, Jean-Michel Pancin acquired degrees in economics (Université Aix II) and then in art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He has been awarded several grants and photography prizes, notably the first Leica Prize in 2001. He is fascinated by mathematical modelling.

Pancin often uses drawings prior to the final phase of the work. He seemed to be saying to the inhabitants of Wendover: “You, the inhabitant, will draw for me what you like about the local landscape, the one where you live; I will then appropriate this landscape, me the photographer, but in order to better recreate it, in the orderly form of photographic capture.”
For example, he asked one Monsieur C., an ex-inmate of the Sainte-Anne prison in Avignon, to draw what he saw and experienced during his twenty years of incarceration there.

 

The archaeology of the life of the prisoners at Sainte-Anne is the subject of the work presented at les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie Toulouseattoirs, Tout dépendait du temps…. Since 2010, like an obsessive modern Balzac, Pancin has been exploring, gleaning, peeling away, classifying and reinventing the lives of these men who have sought tirelessly for snatches of freedom in every last fragment of their confined lives. The prisoners living in this extremely violent world endlessly draw the bodies of voluptuously curvaceous women, lovers’ hearts, and boats whose sails evoke the other world outside, the world beyond their reach. The artist appropriates and conveys back to us all the manifestations of the prisoners’ lives, like the balls of wool thrown to them by their wives and girlfriends from the Doms rock, at the heart of the promenade, but which never reached them, having instead became caught on the roofs or in the gutters, from which the archaeologist later removed them. Overcome with anxiety, troubled by the artistic expression of a reality they are constantly trying to ignore, viewers are deeply affected and in turn find themselves compelled to react, to adjust their position, in their bodies as free beings, in relation to prison itself.