18 Colorful Employee Portraits by Olaf Breuning Add Creativity To Pernod Ricard's Annual Report

Co-creation by Olaf Breuning is a new photo campaign for the Pernod Ricard 2012/2013 annual report in which 18 employees create a fresco for the cover and pose for pages with personal quotes scattered throughout the 168 page annual report.

Pernod Ricard’s commitment to contemporary art, which it has inherited from Paul Ricard, is an integral part of the company’s sponsorship strategy. The Group endeavours to share and promote creativity in all its forms. Therefore, for the last 35 years, Pernod Ricard has commissioned a piece by a renowned contemporary artist to illustrate the cover of its Annual Report.



The approach now focuses on contemporary photography, giving a well-known photographer “carte blanche” to produce portraits of their employees, the front-line ambassadors of the organization’s values. In 2010, Argentinian Marcos Lopez became the first photographer to have his work featured in the report, while French Denis Rouvre and Spanish Eugenio Recuenco have followed in his footsteps in subsequent years.


above photo of Olaf Breuning by Herbert Zimmermann

Olaf Breuning, the Swiss photographer and visual artist, has been selected for this year’s annual report photo campaign. He and 18 Group employees were invited by Pernod Ricard to a private area of the Pompidou Centre to work together on a series of artistic images. Inspired by the 2012/2013 annual report theme of “co-creation”, he asked the models to paint on a gigantic canvas. Each person was given an unusual object or tool with which to paint, and a matching colour.


above: the completed canvas, used on the cover, painted by the 18 employees

Under his artistic direction, the models themselves became the artists for this unusual piece. Joy, pleasure, concentration, introspection – each one of them experienced the range of emotions which goes hand in hand with creation and the images are featured throughout the report, along with their personal quotes, such as the example shown below:



Over three days of “creative conviviality”, the fresco took shape and what emerged was the collaborative work of art which adorns the cover of this document.

All 18 portraits:



















Having been inspired by observing these fledgling artists, Olaf Breuning immortalized the models in portrait form at the end of this creative session: “Artistic creation is often the product of confrontation, of dialogue… I wanted to follow this creative process for a Group that makes sharing and conviviality its signature. The idea was to bring these people that I was meeting for the first time closer to one another, and then to expose them to my world. They had no idea at all of what the final piece would be: like an exquisite artistic cadaver, they would each make their personal contribution, but only I knew where the journey would take us”.



Olaf Breuning was able to infuse his art with Pernod Ricard’s DNA as “Créateurs de convivialité”.

You can read/download the actual annual report here

Heroines by Deborah Oropallo At Melissa Morgan Fine Art

above: Deborah Oropallo, Where am I?, 2012, 50 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches, acrylic on paper

Melissa Morgan Fine Art just received artist Deborah Oropallo's newest paintings and works on paper from her latest series “Heroine.” in their Palm Desert Gallery.

Oropallo says of the Heroine series, which was begun in 2012, “The ‘struggle,’ I think, becomes a kind of metaphor for how women in the media have been portrayed, or wished to be portrayed…pre- or post-feminist, depending on the decade. Since the beginning of the comic-book industry in the 1940s, super-heroines have searched for identity on a broader scale. The super-hero fights for justice, but the super-heroine must also fight for equality. These eroticized and deified female characters, conformed as they are to the comics medium’s traditional visual tropes, thus carry out their struggle in a realm of ironic dichotomies—empowered and exploited, funny and tragic, masked and exposed.”

Don't Believe Me?
2012
Acrylic on Canvas, 64 x 49


This is just the beginning.
2012
80 x 60 inches, acrylic on canvas


What have you done?
2012
49 x 64 inches, acrylic on canvas


There's not enough time!
2012
50 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches, acrylic on paper


How can this be possible?
2012
80 x 60 inches, acrylic on canvas


Not even you!
2012
38 1/2 x 50 1/2 inches, acrylic on paper


This can't be happening!
2012
38 1/2 x 50 1/2 inches, acrylic on paper


From Magolia Editions:

"Deborah Oropallo continues her exploration of the iconography of power and costume in a new series of mixed-media works depicting abstracted female forms clad in superhero costumes. Oropallo’s inspiration for these prints was a troupe of female performers in Los Angeles, whose thriving web-based business venture involves dressing up in superhero costumes and enacting live-action comic books. The artist’s digital manipulation of these figures and their outfits zeroes in on ambiguous moments of dressing and undressing, where a metamorphosis, a kind of becoming or un-becoming, seems to be taking place. This ambiguity is heightened by the artist’s removal of nearly any trace of human flesh or faces from each figure, a signature move that destabilizes the work, creating a tension between figuration and abstraction: because so much information has been removed from each image, the fragments and gestures that remain assume both an air of mystery and a critical significance."

In a 2009 essay on Oropallo’s work, Nick Stone writes: “We know that we are decoding these images not because we are sure of what they mean but precisely because we are unsure; from a semiotic point of view, the works’ indeterminacy is what makes them tick. Because the code is not immediately legible, we become aware of its presence, and are confronted by a system which we may not have even been aware that we were using. This tendency to mask and unmask via layers and distortion is a consistent theme for Oropallo: in a 2004 interview she noted, ‘I’m always trying to soften the definition, [to] dissolve the images a little more.’ Beginning with the Feign series and continuing through the works collected here, Oropallo’s work has increasingly honed in on this theme; she has committed herself to a singular exploration of this indeterminacy, the process of blurring, distorting, and erasing information so as to scramble the viewer’s radar. In Feign, the digitally painted figures are recognizable as such, and their gender roles and costumes are fairly clear; it is the surface code, the medium, the code of line and color on a ground, which is being interrupted and jammed. As the figures in Guise become more indistinct and the boundaries of each figure and his or her costume – the boundaries of his or her very his-ness or her-ness – suddenly the codes of gender and power begin to break down and dissolve into one another. And in Wild Wild West, the figures have disappeared completely, as if acid has eaten away at the underlying medium by which these codes are transmitted. In this series it is as if Oropallo is paring each image down in search of the barest minimum of information necessary for our eyes to read into line and shape a link to some conceptual referent. By feeding our internal codecs ever fuzzier and more ambiguous data, she dares us to be sure of the meaning we take from each image.”

Visit the Melissa Morgan Fine Art gallery to see these wonderful works. They are located at 73-040 El Paseo in Palm Desert, CA.

Big Rice Straw Beasts Sculpted For The Wara Straw Art Festival.

You may or may not have seen images of large sculpted straw beasts, recently being shared all over the internet. Truth be told, they are not new, but are actually a few years old (from 2010 and 2011) from the annual Wara Straw Art festival in Niigata. According to CNN Travel, The Wara Art Matsuri takes place every year in two locations in Niigata, at Kanko Shisetsu Iwamuroya (96-1 Iwamuro Onsen, Nishikan-ku, Niigata) and Uwasekigata park (1 Matsunoo, Nishikan-ku, Niigata).










The festival is an annual celebration of Autumn where local people and college students of Art and Architecture departments create some impressive straw art in Nishikan-ku, an area is said to have the "largest paddy fields in the country," according to Japan Style.













The art is created from rice straw by locals and college students. The structures are made from pipes and wood sticks, then the straw is added, taking about a week per piece to complete.

images are courtesy of Kotaku and CNN Travel