"What is miraculous about Prulhière's work is the way in which he refreshes mid-20th century automatism by engaging with it so directly. His work is not underpinned by theoretical constructs, nor is it limited to post-modern irony. If in Prulhière's hands, painting is subject to a certain amount of abuse, it is perhaps because the tradition to which his work most closely relates is good old Action Painting, which has also taken some hits from history. These mutant painting-sculptures remind us of what might happen to survivors of an apocalypse who find themselves amidst the rubble of a modern art collection and assemble the pieces into shelters and refuges."
Raphael Rubinstein, "8 painters : New York", Edouard Prulhière: The Recycler, in Art in America, November 2003, n°11
New York-based French painter Edouard Prulhière has been exhibiting canvases for the past few years that feature a colorful multitude of splashes, drips and splatters, not as flat objects that hang on the wall, but on parts of "funky" wall assemblages and actual sculptures. In works such as It's Not Raining in England (2003) and Minha Querida (2003), the canvas covered in colored splatters suggests a relationship with the wildest edges of abstract expressionism. These canvases are subjected to all forms of outrages.
In constructing his hybrid pieces, Prulhière crumples, twists and tears his canvases, using them more as construction materials than works of art. Some are crudely rolled up and screwed to wooden structures; others are cut into strips and then rolled up and held together by pieces of plastic. There are sofa cushions, pieces of linoleum, plywood boards, pieces of wood molding, all painted in a similar fashion. Occasionally pieces of melted industrial plastic pop up.
Minha Querida - my darling, in Portuguese - is a sculpture just over two meters high. Rising from one side, an irregularly shaped wooden board with two thin legs, one straight, one curved, a large biomorphic opening suggesting the hole of the painter's palette, partially covered with yellow, red and blue sprays and drips; on the other side stands a violently crumpled canvas surrounding a hidden vertical support. The lid of a garbage can covered in layer upon layer of vibrantly colored paint has been roughly inserted into the opening of the folded canvas. A pair of cushions, also roughly shaped and covered in drips and drips of gray, white, yellow and red, is pressed into the base of the work, while three small banners, each hanging from a delicate wooden coat rack, hung from a protruding element of the sculpture, introduce an incongruous note of fragility. Streaked with gray and white paint on each side, these banners could be seen as an homage to the hanging scrolls of Chinese and Japanese painting.
A recent mural, Waiting for the Elevator (2003), looks as if it has been compressed in a trash compactor and heroically but pathetically re-stretched. There are tears, crushed pieces of canvas barely held together by steel screws and washers, broken stretcher bars piercing the torn canvas from one area of solid white and blue to another where paint has been spilled and brushed on. These bizarre structures have many affinities with other works of art. Hybrids between painting and sculpture, they have a relationship to early works by Rauschenberg and more recent works by Marcaccio, Jessica Stockholder and Daniel Weiner. The perforated and lacerated canvases remind us of Fontana, the vibrant splashes and drips evoke more recent paintings by Sam Francis, as well as earlier ones by Norman Bluhm, and those of the mid-1980s by Julian Schnabel; while the vibrant colors suggest Hans Hoffman. Looking at Prulhière's work, I also think of Steven Parrino, John Chamberlain, Christo's early packaged sculptures, Manollo Millares' saturated canvases, Niki de Saint Phalle's "shots," Lynda Benglis' painted bas-reliefs of the early 1970s, and Giussepe "Pinot" Gallizio's 1959 abstract paint-to-ceiling installation. Prulhière's deconstructive approach to canvas and stretcher also has obvious connections to the Supports/Surfaces movement.