Bruno Peinado. The Hacienda must be rebuilt

This masterful installation, entitled The Hacienda must be rebuilt, will display permanently on the façade of the extension of the Mrac, in order to link the two buildings conceptually and aesthetically and to create a sign in the public space. The artist's project is comprised of two powerful gestures. The first symbolically links the two buildings by mirroring the grey colour of the granite blocks of the existing museum over the entirety of the extension. The second aspect of the project will allow a dialogue between the strong presence of advertising boards and an imagination linked both to abstract art and to the artistic avant-garde which the museum's collection represents. Peinado's project is made up of affixing a series of advertising hoardings with all their publicity content removed, and placing them alongside abstract paintings. Each board, made with the same techniques used in commercial production, creates a link with the history of art in general and in particular with the Mrac's collection and offers visitors an open air museum in a public space.

Solo exhibition
The exhibition The Hacienda must be rebuilt continues Bruno Peinado's installation of the same name on the façade of the Mrac by playing with a dialogue between the interior and the exterior of the museum. The exhibition, conceived as a landscape which we must "rebuild," offers a parallel between the creation of the communal space, and its own construction, inspired by the idea of the Hacienda. The hacienda motif comes from a manifesto written in the 1950s by the Russian situationist thinker Ivan Chtcheglov, which would give its name to the legendary Manchester nightclub created by Joy Division and Factory Records. The project lay the foundations of the British house scene, and remains an important place where musicians, artists and designers can meet, inspired by the avant-garde influences which they can recreate through their album covers, posters and visual production. This place was a social space for a host of different creative disciplines, and has been rethought by Bruno Peinado as an extension of the exhibition, where every Sunday for four months a variety of events will take place, in a cross-generational and cross-disciplinary mix. The programme is found on mrac.languedocroussillon.fr.

On the first floor of the museum the focus is on the practice of drawing, the first skill an artist learns. Drawing is removed from its usual cadre and is transformed into different pictorial experimentations. Peinado, leaning on his concern for abstraction and colour, plays with codes and references, in an exercise which is simultaneously a homage and an appropriation of the ideas and artists which have inspired him, from the Suppports/Surfaces movement to the suprematists, from the Californian minimalists to Colorfield Painting and from Matisse to BMPT. Some of the pictures also play with this heritage, which has been reinvigorated by graphic design, while others play on children's collages and other forms. There are a variety of different formats, but each of Peinado's works are portrait. The pictures make reference to advertising but also to the permanence of painting as an open window to the world. They all share a specific chromatic range, as if they had been irradiated by the sun, in a reference to the artists' native south of France.

The terminology "personal exhibition" is especially pertinent here to qualify such an important French artist's project, and thus the challenge of the work, playing with the idea of flux, of the remix and the Tout-Monde dear to Edouard Glissant, which prefigures our current "post-internet" generation. We must view the exhibition The Hacienda must be rebuilt as a self-portrait, simultaneously personal and collective, of a character with a complex, fragile and unstable personality, at the crossroads of himself and others, who is trying to create a new way of viewing the world, in a general context of tension and withdrawal.