The result of a partnership between the Museum of Beaux-Arts in Brest and Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain, the exhibition Les géants brings together the recent works of the artist Pascal Rivet (born in 1966 in Quimper, France). Emerging in the context of the Tour de France, Brest being the starting place of the 2021 race, Les géants is both a chance to see the artist’s latest paintings and a celebration of cycling.

From the 1990s, Pascal Rivet has been interested in the world of sport, appropriating the images of champions or reproducing key moments of competitions. He has adopted the persona of a footballer with Eric Cantona, a tennis player with Mary Pierce and a cyclist with Marco Pantani. The world of cycling provided particular inspiration, combining the heroic, serious figure of the racer with a humour at times benevolent and at times dark and cynical. That is how in 2021 we come to Pascal Rivet’s fascination for this world in its own right.

Considering himself an artist-ethnographer, he willingly declares, not without irony, ”Instead of moving in a straight line, I have tried to lose myself.” Whereas he began his career using the formalist and minimal language of the great abstract sculptors such as Anthony Caro and Richard Serra, he soon chose to conceal reality with realistic but flawed sculptures, produced in materials that were – a priori – inappropriate.

This new project, Les géants, is a response from Pascal Rivet to the invitation from the Passerelle in the context of the Tour de France. This year, Brest is the town where the Tour de France will start, a rare event and reason for celebration; this is the joyful and unifying context giving the artist his inspiration.
The title ‘The Giants’ pays homage as much to the supposed heroic character of the cyclists in a great eponymous painting by the artist, as to their size, as the work measures almost 8 metres in length. The motif is not realistic, it is blurred, as if the image had suffered a shock wave. The sportsmen of the painting are falling, the dislocation of the image gives way to that of men’s bodies. This accident becomes a hallucination, evoking both the taking of substances such as recreational or doping drugs, undeniably linked – unfortunately – to the history of modern cycling, and a knock-out fall that blurs the vision and alters senses. This spectacle of disaster evokes the great paintings of epic battles such as those of Uccello, the Florentine Renaissance master or those disastrous occasions like the famous painting of the Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa) (1818-1819) by Géricault. This fall, dragging the cyclists into it, is irredeemable, as cruel as it can be, it forms part of this sport and its competitive stakes. Furthermore, this unhappy painting is, for the artist, a mirror held up to the troubling times in which we are living.This huge painting also functions as a jigsaw puzzle of the exhibition itself. A series of paintings completes the central work; they are small fragments of the large painting. Whereas the image was still readable in the integral version, here it escapes from view, becoming totally abstract. Pascal Rivet’s work possesses a constant playful character, that of a joyous creation despite the circumstances.