Pierre-Yves Le Duc

The mise en scène carries viewers on a journey that is reminiscent of a Grand Tour through 22 Italian cities (Amalfi, Assisi, Bergamo, Capri, Herculaneum, Florence, Genoa, Milan, Monreale, Naples, Orvieto, Padua, Palermo, Pisa, Pompeii, Portofino, Rome, Siena, Siracuse, Sorrento, Venice, Verona). Paris and Cannes are also included as Pierre-Yves Le Duc was raised in the former and started this cycle of works in the latter.

‘MAGIGONIE’ is a neologism coined by Le Duc; the series serendipitously spawned from an earlier cycle (APPARATO, 2013-2016). At the time, he was bent on investigating the evolution of creative actions by recreating the same ink drawing over a three-year span. He designed parameters and methodologies for this project and produced 12.000 drawings and 2.000 scrap sheets. He did not destroy the latter but rather kept them as ‘latent’ pieces.

Le Duc says about the project’s origins, “in 2014, I began to create the first MAGIGONIE collage by combining black and white souvenir postcards from the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s with ink-stained fragments chosen from the APPARATO scraps; I was looking for poetic, narrative, and graphic correspondences, imagining the world extending beyond the photo’s frame. The body of works that emerged, therefore, urges to press past visible reality, not to stop at the magic of art but rather to find the art of artistic magic, a practice that is formed in its doing and emerges through experimentation. This approach seeks to expose the abstract nature which characterizes photographic illusion, to trace the unsteady boundary separating the real from the unreal. The exercise of looking beyond the picture can also lend temporary access to the subconscious, revealing it, and hence highlighting the process and the vision underlying the image. This connection sharpens the natural ability to see beyond the physical contours of a picture.”

Alfredo De Dominicis says about the series, “Le Duc juxtaposes order and chaos, the known with the unknown. Two worlds, two visions, chase each other in recursive order. On the one hand, we are shown the known World in a series of postcards reproducing some of its most iconic places; on the other, there is a primordial World or perhaps a future, post-human World. Or, one might one posit that what is mirrored in this quasi-infinite, cyclical sequence – toying with ideas of repetition and reproduction so dear to the artist – is actually the same World, at times masked, at others exposed, raw and naked, ‘atomized’. And hence, one might wonder: which version is then the true one?”