Daniel Pflumm

Daniel Pflumm was born in Switzerland in 1968 and currently lives and works in Berlin. His show at the Palais de Tokyo will be his first in France and will feature a number of recent works that have never been exhibited prior to this event. The exhibition will offer visitors the chance to discover a body of work that covers several different and complementary fields: the world of mass media, musical production, graphic interventions, video work, the design of commercial products and manufacture of technical objects. All of the pieces are artworks, however, whose nature might appear ambiguous at first glance and which the artist uses to play with codes, forms and rules.

In the early 1990s in Berlin, Pflumm founded a number of music clubs in which his videos were a fundamental part of the venue's design, and where musical performances by DJs Klaus Kotai and Gabriele "Mo" Loschelder were held. With Kotai and Loschelder, the artist also founded the music label "Elektro Musik Department." Pflumm has always had a knack for deftly mixing genres and fields of expression and sparking dialog and encounters between individuals.

A large part of his work focuses on famous brand logos which he "diverts" and reuses to his advantage. Is this a fascination with the power of marketing or a Warholian recycling in an attempt to draw off the subliminal essence of an advertising image? The answer lies somewhere else. " Daniel Pflumm is developing an analysis of both the communication strategies used by the media and the codes at work in the aesthetics of advertising. For him what is important is not the article or product but the strategies, the techniques of persuasion, the packaging, in other words the way the product is presented as well as the tools of that presentation. Pflumm doesn't formulate critiques; rather, he appropriates the methods employed by companies that condition our visual behavior in the age of globalization… He reworks, looks at anew, appropriates symbols, reconstructs logos, separates out their different colors, elements and structures. Pflumm reinterprets this visual language and thereby contributes to abolishing the distinction between production and consumption, creation and utopia, the ready-made and the original work of art. He forces the viewer and the potential consumer to reconsider their positions."1

In his videos, the work of deconstructing and assembling that the artist carries out appears to be as much graphic and geometric play as a reworking of meaning. It is as if he were attempting to attain the structural and semantic essence of a visual archetype that has been reexamined by an artist, the result amounting to a mysterious minimalist object whose new status escapes our understanding. Whether filming high-speed trains, endlessly repeating excerpts from television news coverage, playing off the logo of the gallery where he is showing-a logo created by the artist moreover-simplifying a form to the point of abstraction and illegibility, or merely sampling images around him, the process always embodies extreme simplicity while the sober, obvious and clear character of the outcome makes it an ineluctable conclusion. Each of these images adds to the great databank that the artist is putting together and which he regularly dips into to fuel, shake up or reactivate his oeuvre.

"A large part of my work takes shape by reflecting various realities. One of those realities is my immediate environment. There are a number of people who are active around me, with admirable projects and intentions. The Mitte neighborhood in Berlin offered, for example, an incredible degree of freedom in the '90s. Another important part of this context is the reality of television, very important in my video work, and the music world, that society with its own rules, its own law, like some semi-permeable system."2

Deftly playing on subversion and introducing the subjectivity of the artist in the very real world in which he lives, Pflumm's undertaking aims to pervert usual codes and forms, operating by succeeding and subtle displacements. The result is often disconcerting. The show at the Palais de Tokyo is thus a new and complementary stage in that vast operation of sampling fragments of reality that Daniel Pflumm has undertaken to offer us his reading of the world. Pressetext

Daniel Pflumm
Kurator: Marc Sanchez