Bruno Pélassy

"In 1987, while finishing his training as a tailor, Bruno Pélassy was living in a studio apartment in Paris, amidst dark clutter and a cascade of needles, lace and fur that his mother used to bring him from Nice. On his cathode-ray television, his VHS tapes played on repeat: The Exorcist (1973), Female Trouble (1974), and The Law of the Strongest (1975). Sometimes he would turn the volume down to play his vinyl records along with the images: "Madame Butterfly" by Malcolm McLaren (1984), the recording of Ingrid Caven at Le Pigall's (1978), anything by Madonna. On a pine shelf, a Chanel perfume bag and the beginnings of a library: La Nuit juste avant les forêts (1977), Dans la solitude des champs de coton (1985) and Le Retour au désert (1988). Like Koltès, the author of these books, Pelassy was gay, born into a Catholic family, with a military father and a housewife mother." As it turns out from the words of Baptiste Pinteaux, throughout his life Bruno Pélassy embodied a multifaceted and gleaming persona, one of a rampant collector whose subversive and sensual oeuvre rejects pigeonholing. His work, which spans over a decade (1990s–2000s), range from sculptures and bijoux to drawings and films, incorporating motifs from both haute couture and the second-hand cultures of a throwaway society, addressing both the issues of adornment and those of technology.
Pélassy was born in 1966 in Vientiane, Laos, where his father worked as a mechanic in the air force, and he grew up amid the souvenirs his parents brought back with them: lengths of fabrics bought at markets, photographs of Khmer temples, and stories of Buddhist funeral rites.
In the early 1990s, he began drawing and making his first jewelry pieces, mixing glass beads and black leather, and he started to collaborate occasionally with Swarovski. His first solo exhibition was held in 1993 at the Galerie Art Concept in Nice, where he presented a series of reliquaries, including a memorable bleached denim jacket adorned with huge red glass beads. He produced a series of drawings entitled We gonna have a good time which combine images from a classic 1970s hairdressing book with those from a medical textbook on facial diseases. With the same biting humor, he also created his first Bestioles ("Beasties"): a series of wigs concealing toy robots that animate them in a jerky manner. One of his most iconic work is Sans titre, Sang titre, Cent titres (1995), a feature-length film entirely made up of pirated fragments of movies and television excerpts. He continued sculpting with glass beads, crafting beautiful, ever-erect phalluses.
Pélassy died in 2002 in Nice from complications related to AIDS at the age of thirty-six. As he became weaker, he surrounded himself with a crowd of small creatures made of pearls, silk, and silicone—a "freaky pet shop" installed in the comfort of his own home. His last solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Vigna in Nice and is beautifully entitled Shim. Double gender.