Paul Etienne Lincoln
11 November 2006 - 10 February 2007
pictures 
At 9 p.m. on Saturday 11 November 2006, the new one-man show of work by Paul Etienne Lincoln, celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Panhard Special and his new film The Velocity of Thought, opens at Guido Costa Projects in Via Mazzini 24, Turin.
Already known to the torinese public, who saw his large installation Sinfonia Torinese in the same space in via Mazzini two years ago, this time Paul Etienne Lincoln has decided to unveil one of his seminal works, planned and realised in 1976 and modified over the years until taking on its present form.
This piece, never before exhibited, is a life-sized prototype car, powered by a Panhard Levassor Tigre engine fuelled by Nitrous Oxide, natural gas and linseed oil.
Originally the car had interchangeble silk bodywork stretched over a delicate steel spaceframe ; this solution was dropped in the early 80s and replaced with the current aluminium shell.
Each part of the vehicle was designed and realized manually without using pieces already available on the market.
From a conceptual standpoint, this piece works on two different levels: the artists has produced a vehicle with the cleanest possible combustion engine, and probed the theme of respiration and the man/machine relationship, resulting in their materialization into a sort of symbolic form.
The technical drawings for the prototype are an integral part of the piece, along with the specially constructed pressure suit for the driver (interconnected to the car by means of a convoluted umbilical tube that guarantees a steady temperature while driving), a short film, The Velocity of Thought, documents the trip from Friuli (where the car was restored specially for the exhibition) to the test track on the Lingotto building (where the car was put through its paces).
Like all the work by Paul Etienne Lincoln, The Velocity of Thought is a complex and sophisticated piece, wrapped in the visionary and poetic atmosphere enveloping the early days of mechanics. The Velocity of Thought was filmed on location in Sequals PN and the Lingotto factory in Torino in 2006.The spiral south ramp of Lingotto has been transformed into a mnemonic architecture,using a system similar to Guilio Camillo’s 1550. Idea del Teatro.Embroidered racing flags signal the five floors,where five separate projects are subliminaly refrenced, each incorporating a central device of respiration and atmospherics to describe each of there separate projects inner workings
Many historical and cultural references resurface in this piece, spanning combustion as a metaphor for life to the indomitable spirit of knowledge, represented here as the prototype climbs the long helichoidal ramps inside the Lingotto building.
Once again the artists has managed to dextrously assemble the nuts and bolts of history and culture, technology and art into a unique machine with an extraordinarily evocative force.
Panhard Special - The Velocity of Thought will be on show to the public during gallery opening times until 10 February 2007.
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Paul Etienne Lincoln (born in England), resident in New York, is one of the more complex and intriguing artists on the international scene, who has created many “exhibition” pieces that became famous because of their complexity and the meticulous way in which they were put together. For many years, he has been working on the relationship between nature and mechanics, producing work with a fable-like and unreal flavour, studded with evocations of the history of science and artistic culture. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the world, and it can be found in many important collections in Italy and abroad. This is his second exhibition in Turin. Paul Etienne is represented exclusively by Alexander and Bonin in New York and Guido Costa Projects in Turin.