Arlequin (Personnage à Réactiver)

Inspired by advertising, cinema, role-play and virtual reality, Pierre Joseph bases his artistic practice on the principle of mise en scène, the art of staging. In his Personnages à réactiver [Characters to Be Reactivated], a series begun in 1991, each work has a dual existence, on the one hand as performance, in which an actor takes the part of a popular fictional character (Superman, a witch, Snow White…), on the other as the photograph of that first activation. Here a melancholy and impassive Harlequin acts as avatar of the long succession of his predecessors in the history of art. Half-man, half-artwork, he offers a new version of himself, midway between fiction and reality.