Gilles Barbier

Gilles Barbier is establishing a body of work which he defines neither as critical, nor as "painting of the world", nor as problematic, but as so many fictions. The distance which he accordingly introduces with the "intelligence of the work" offers him a considerable mobility, bothersome for anyone wanting to simplify the whole in a coherent unity.
His career, with the rigorous copy of the dictionary as background noise, traverses bodies defined as clones, "mediagenic" spaces with bed-ridden super heroes, but also the pornosphere, and "corrected" worlds... Concerned with associating the rigour of his theoretical work—his "rumination"--, with this corpus, Gilles Barbier informs a continuous flow of drawings and images with texts and tools of reflection. Among his tools, we find certain cheeses, relay batons, bananas, earthworms, burrows, tube space, Vaseline, the atom bomb, cosmetics, obesity... Gilles Barbier is patiently constructing an oeuvre which conveys the tragic shattering of being and its violent expulsion beyond the subject. Galerie Georges-Phillipe & Nathalie Vallois