Pierre Allain
pierre.allain.contact@gmail.com

Petrine
55 rue des Petites Écuries
75010 Paris
info@petrine.fr
petrine.fr

Pierre Allain works across sculpture, drawing, and sound. His practice draws on materials and devices associated with medical, industrial, and other environments structured by the regulation of bodies, often selected for their functional properties of absorption, reflection, transmission, or restraint. By displacing these elements into exhibition contexts, he examines how systems designed for control can also register vulnerability, affect, and states of psychological or physical strain.

Allain’s works frequently operate through reduction rather than assertion: muffled sound, reflective or resistant surfaces, concealed sources, and reduced visibility. Sound is often dispersed or partially suppressed, while surfaces appear at once reflective and withholding, producing conditions in which perception becomes unstable and access remains partial. Across different media, Allain constructs situations in which attention is slowed and disoriented, foregrounding how bodies internalise conditions of labour, discipline, and exposure.

Informed by research into psychogenic phenomena and processes of somatisation, his practice considers how abstract systems, whether economic, technological, or narrative, are registered physically. His works often engage thresholds of perception and consciousness, from states of induced sleep to conditions of sensory reduction, where attention shifts toward the inaudible or unseen. Recurring references to repair, maintenance, and repetition further situate the work within cycles of use and exhaustion, where minimal gestures give rise to subtle but persistent emotional and bodily responses.