PARIS.- Cowboy Tapestry Pietà or the meeting of three virgins and a cowboy played by American actor Fred Gwynne. The portrait comes from a screen shot from the film Pet Sematary, adapted from the -Stephen King novel, and shows its figure lying on the ground, pixelated to resemble a cityscape. Here we have a symbol par excellence of America, especially in its evocation of the Pop culture that has been flowering since the late 1960s. But don’t get it wrong, Thomas Bayrle can’t be pigeonholed: he’s no more Pop than Op!

In Bayrle’s exhibition at Air de Paris our cowboy is rubbing shoulders with a fictional wooden shopping mall and a series of paintings on card from 2012 whose source images date from the artist’s first visit to Japan in 1978. He spent six weeks in Tokyo back then, walking night and day as he photographed the city.

Another fundamental aspect of the Bayrle oeuvre is the move from one medium to another, from the distortion of a once-artisanal motif to the digitally inflected. We find this happening in his installation Capsel, 68 photographs from 1984–1985 documenting the making of a monumental collage showing a man and a woman in bed. Scrutinising this new work, we find that the distortion of the image was effected by printing it onto manually stretched latex – an easier way of simulating ongoing movement. In its current version Capsel gives an eloquent account of brilliant manipulation and transformation of iconic forms.

Lastly, and most importantly, the gallery offers a sneak preview of four new works linked to the project Pietà for World War I, an imposing tapestry produced in association with Aubusson to mark the centenary of the First World War. Tapestry is a medium Bayrle is particularly familiar with: in 1956 he began training as a weaver in a textile plant, an experience that accounts for the specific character of his work, as well as his fascination with various tools for mechanising and duplicating woven representations. This image-within-image approach is interspersed with representatives of a certain form of modernity and mass production: thus we find new Madonnas at freeway interchanges, and Andrea Mantegna seemingly in dialogue with the beaches at Rimini.