Neverendingstories

Skills: Paintings Drawings

Never Ending Stories, Black marker on paper, 70x50cm, 20015-2018, collection Agnès b, Paris

: Cette fois c’est la guerre – Drawing on paper, black marker, 70x50cm, 2016

Never Ending Stories, Centre André Malraux, Sarajevo, black marker on paper, 40x50cm, 2004-2010

Never Ending Stories, Duplex100m2, curated by Claudia Zini, Sarajevo, 2017

‘… These drawings are the reflect of our today craziness, of the craziness of the war, of the craziness of peoples, it is about the huge capacity for human to destroy them self…’

Since more than ten years Pierre Courtin has been working on two different series on drawings in a ‘non-stop’ process. The first series started in 2004 and it counts 150 drawings (black marker on paper, 40x50cm) as of today. The second series (black marker on paper, 70x50cm) was initiated the day after the ferocious assassination of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists in January 2015 and it now comprehends 20 drawings.

Pierre Courtin’s drawings are made of different newspapers’ headlines, books’ covers, advertisements, posters, and so on. The artist’s practice is a visual echo to the continuous stream of everyday news and its final outcome constitutes a big composition resembling a personal press clipping with the most important news and hot topics dealing with politics and society. World tragic events and human tragedies are recorded, from WWI up until Trump’s election, often mixing news from the past with present-day news; this stratagem results very effective in underlining the absurdity of events happening over and over again in history. The drawings represent the artist’s personal reflection about the times in which we are living, particularly insisting on themes such as the return on nationalism in Europe, capitalism and consumerism, racism and religion, in general ‘the craziness of our time’. They will to question our close ‘relation-ship’ or addiction to mass media, representing at the same time the artist’s meditative reaction to everyday violence as it portraited on daily news. As Courtin explained ‘When I say « meditative » it means that in this crazy world I am finding time to draw and to relax myself, those drawings are very long to do, when I draw these sentences and images become abstract; it is a sort of personal way to exorcise the brutality of our today world’.

Claudia Zini, Sarajevo, December 2016

All drawings are made with black markers on white paper. The drawing project won the Fondation de France Award in 2005.

Never Ending Stories, collective exhibition « DRAW » curated by Jean-François Sanz, galerie du jour agnès b, 2008, Paris (right side Abdelkader Benchamma)