09 april to  04 september 2011
Opening reception of first part : Saturday 9 April at 6 p.m.

the CCC will be presenting the next major personal exhibition by Pierre Ardouvin.
The exhibition will bring together two essential focuses of the artist’s work, installations and drawing, which he has always developed in complementary and related fashion. It will therefore be divided between the vast maze of the “Empty House”, a large and previously unseen installation, and a group of some fifty graphic works dating from 1992 up to the present day.

Making one’s way through the meandering alleyways of the “Empty House” will be complemented by another form of labyrinth, a mental maze this time, created by the drawings: this bringing together of different periods in his career and different types of images, and of recollections of past projects since carried out, will provide us with an equally sinuous and reduced itinerary through the artist’s imagination.

“The Empty House” is an installation produced for the exhibition in its extended and definitive form (following and earlier reduced version presented at the Villa du Parc d’Annemasse in 2008). At the CCC, it will transform almost all of the total area into a huge chaotic labyrinth.
The initially playful experience it provides, not unlike a fairground attraction, rapidly takes on overtones of strangeness. The work is made up of rickety partitions as fragile as a house of cards and evocative of the broken lines of expressionist film sets in which madness and anxiety lurk, as in Murnau’s “Nosferatu” or Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari”. Sound, which always has a major presence in Ardouvin’s creations, also works to confuse our points of reference: doors bang and we don’t know where or why, complicating our perception of space and amplifying the feeling of loss and disorientation. This aimless wandering around the “Empty House”, through doors that lead nowhere but back to themselves finally plunges us into the midst of an absurdist dream.

The exhibition’s other focus comprises a large room of drawings, bringing together for the first time a logical ensemble representative of all the artists’ graphic work produced since 1992. For Ardouvin, drawing is a spontaneous activity that he carries out in constant and recurrent fashion, and which has a number of different functions: a means of noting down ideas or visualising projects, it can also take on a more autonomous status, closer to automatic drawing, to create pure images and visions. Although he sometimes resorts to distorted photographic images and collages, Ardouvin’s first choice is aquarelle, a light technique in line with the spontaneity sought for, and whose reference to the “Sunday painter” would in no way displease this lover of forms of popular culture.

Second part of the exhibition in partnership with Château du Rivau. Commencing 18 June
CIRCULATION DE L’ŒUVRE « La Maison Vide » à l’extérieur :
Exposition « Habiter », du 31 mai au 1er novembre 2015, Domaine de Chamarande