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Untitled (Candles)

  • 2010
  • Philippe Parreno
  • 15 paraffin candles with metal core in different blue shades
  • 120,0 x 10,0 x 10,0 cm each candle

This work by Philippe Parreno was originally created in 2007 as a scented, white version. As this first version, comprising 13 candles, was destroyed, the artist subsequently decided to recreate it, colouring the candles in a gradient of pastel shades and increasing their number to 15, but without the scents.

Scented birthday candles are not known to exist; however, they are often coloured in a palette of pastel shades. They thus come to symbolise a ritual that marks the passage of time, as well as the subjective memories associated with this celebration. These adult-sized birthday candles evoke a memory specific to this rite of passage, which is often associated with childhood (another recurring theme in Parreno’s work). In his work, these candles occupy a similar place to that of the Christmas tree.

Parreno Philippe, Untitled, 2010. Crédit artiste : © Philippe Parreno | Crédit photographique : © Louis Vuitton / Timo Ohler

Philippe Parreno

Preferring projects to objects, Philippe Parreno began examining different approaches to narration and representation in the 1990s, through film, sculpture, performance, drawing and text.

He is interested in the exhibition as a medium, and is constantly questioning and reinventing its format. In 1999 the No Ghost Just a Shell project, launched with Pierre Huyghe, invited 20 artists to bring to life the manga character Ann Lee, to which they acquired the rights. Through collaborations and polyphony, the project was built up with images and text, stories and signs, disrupting the rules of media. Another important collaboration was the portrait of Zinedine Zidane made with Douglas Gordon, a high-impact visual study of the paradox of a deceptive image (Zidane, 2006). In the 2000s, ghosts, ventriloquists and robots began appearing in his films, posing the question of the origins of storytelling.

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