Compiled on poorly or not indexed blogs, his investigations from now on borrow from yesteryear naturalists, their methods of exploration, prospecting, inventorying, and mediation, in order to better break free from them. Since settling in the small village of Meillac, in Ille-et-Vilaine, the artist has fallen into a new vortex: a world populated by strangers, where time flies by at breakneck speed, space expands, and drama and sex punctuate the daily lives of filthy, harmful, parasitic, or invisible beings. Shit flies, bedbugs, moths, Temnothorax nylanderi, Isotomurus maculatus, Araneus diadematus…

The exhibition L’île aux mouches (Fly Island) is a disturbing testimony of this encounter, where, for once, everything starts from the end: the tomb of a springtail named the Pharaoh of Mycelium.

Equipped with macro lenses and logbooks, using maps, lists, and phylogenetic trees, Inspector Pinard becomes enamored with the poetry of binomial nomenclature, takes artificial taxonomies a little too far, is moved by metamorphoses, and follows the wanderings of migrations. The fabulous and fabulist worlds of insects and arachnids now dictate the artist’s asymptotic quest.

From a pupa to a doll, from a soft toy to a cuddly one, Guillaume Pinard composes an emotional bestiary, a genealogy of fetishes and projections. The fly pupa, a transitional form between larva and imago, opens up a politics of becoming, while the doll, a normative simulacrum of the human, mirrors our own metamorphoses. This soft and articulated bestiary escapes hierarchies, deadly classifications, and any promise of completion. Superheroes, reduced to textile envelopes with makeshif, costumed identities, lose their omnipotence. Exceptionalism and virility collapse in favor of a regime of care. Close to the transitional object dear to Winnicott, these figures alleviate the anxiety of the separation of worlds (children/adults; humans/non-humans; real/fictional; visible/invisible…). Contrary to a rational modernity that classifies, names, and isolates, the cocoon no longer promises the imago, the doll no longer teaches a model, the hero no longer saves the world. As emotional pieces of evidence, they become the witnesses of a non-heroic, non-spectacular reality, woven from unfinished metamorphoses, minority narratives, and precarious existences.

Marion Zilio, December 2025

We are pleased to present Guillaume Pinard’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.

“La rue des mésanges” is the name given to this new set of large-format paintings, which Guillaume Pinard produced this summer, and which he will exhibit from October 16 to November 28, 2021.
In parallel to this exhibition, he will present “Pour Salir le Perron” at the Telmah contemporary art gallery, in Rouen, from October 15 to December 18, 2021.

I grew up in a Tits Street.

Do not look for Tits street in inner Paris, there is none. For that matter there is none in Lyon downtown, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille, etc.

Tits streets appeared à the end of the sixties, along the development of private housing estates in the suburbs of big cities. A Tits Street is a street without a history, with no link with the area where it stands. Very often associated with other passerines (bullfinches, goldfinches, warblers Streets, etc.) in a “birds estate”, this urban graft purposely promises its owners something bucolic; a street which pretends the mineralization of the land to be a rural project, and its ballasts earth to be humus, with Jardiland or Truffaut, dealers of biologic diversity on the way to work, in order to make one’s patch of garden a piece of nature.

I have been caught out on this dream, this zoning of an imaginative world, using a strictly market and implement language, where nothing puts out roots (an accessory, a tool, a machine for each gesture, each trip, a shop sign for each function). It is this franchised dream, this street even left a long time ago, that I am still fighting with and against, from where I speak, draw and paint this infected prettiness, this glut of landscape, the chained up bodies, a second hand colored-print trade.

Guillaume Pinard, 2021

The phrase is a little exaggerated, definitely hackneyed, but at least, it means what it says. It suggests an epic dimension, gives the man the bearing of a romantic hero, supposes a role to be acted possibly with style.

The last time Guillaume Pinard occupied Gallery Anne Barrault, he was sounding his legitimacy as a painter, beyond his interdisciplinary profile. The painter in itself, the painters within him: the amateur, or the most learned one, the one who knows as well as the coarsest. That was the call, at the time. Humble, conscientious, he faced his practice, as if taking up a challenge, getting his hands dirty. Capable of this, smart for that, incapable of drawing this line, awkward with that color…

An exhilarating experience which today makes him put aside the question of being legitimate or not, for some time only. Freed from this burden, Guillaume Pinard can readily pace the multiple, wild and steep countries of his personal painting, in order to draw a map of it very meticulously. There is the aim. By playing the discreet conquistadors or the careless adventurers, as you like, he sheds, as usual, his images he combines or links. He arranges them, like markers on a background to be filled, an area, a map to be soiled, drawing relations he assumes obvious. From one point to the other, from one line to a subject, he draws. He hurries, as much as possible, and avoids stopping too brutally. Matters are bound, one color brings a tint, a frame leads to a format.

The painter and the cartographer are the one and same face that Guillaume Pinard tries to show, diligently,

efficiently. He has a role to play. “La Diligence”, the title of his new exhibition, calls to mind, of course, this promptness to carry out the work, to do a nice quick job, at least as best as possible. A feverish unrestrained hurry. The title evokes too the stagecoach in westerns, which allows its passenger to travel across bare, hostile, unique lands. To achieve this aim, Guillaume holds the reins of his introspections. To estimate his painting, he knows he must go by such or such place. And never mind the way or the direction, since only the movement matters.

Franck G. Richard