Guillaume Pilet Learning to Love

Guillaume Pilet (born 1984 in Payerne, lives and works in Lausanne) describes himself—although he already counts among today’s established young Swiss artists—as an interested amateur in the world of art. In his works, he skillfully juggles between high and low, art and do-it-yourself, and, in so doing, incessantly blurs the boundaries between the genres. Naïve forms and motifs, simple materials and techniques such as wood, ceramic, batik or sponge painting, and everyday objects are intermixed with references and figures from art history and the sciences. He energetically blends intuition and careful analysis, aesthetics of bad taste and distinguished chic. These elements coalesce in his paintings, photography, videos, sculptures, and installations into a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. With such juxtapositions, he also negotiates hierarchies of cultural production and mechanisms of representation. In a nonchalant and incessantly tongue-in-cheek approach, he probes mechanisms of art and his own output as an artist.