How do you get into Gilles Barbier’s work? It’s a question asked of most artists. And historians will be quick to answer: from the beginning. Whereas semiologists will tell you: by its structure (its signifier). But that’s all a misreading. Gilles Barbier’s approach refuses to do that, and his network of burrows dug and surveyed by worms can be approached from any direction. I understand that this will disconcert some people who have been brought up on unifying linear methods. But we must insist: enter from wherever you like: the worm, the cosmos, the black, the comic bubble, the copy, the fold, the cloning, the escape, the suicide, the hole, etc. Enter and exit, that is the way it is.
Enter and exit, is Barbier’s injunction,
dig into the earth and spring up into the sky. In other words, a fierce, almost foetal territorialisation (the mother’s womb as a breeding ground) and the surging deterritorialisation of blackness. The worm could block desire at the bottom of a dead-end hole, but the surfboards, cousins of spaceships, rise up into the black azure and release that same desire in proliferating words. The subterranean and aerial worm is made of the same gothic line without beginning or end, a rhizome, an interlacing. Something like the illuminations of the Celts, the noodles of 1900s architecture, Pollock, all pulsing on the web.
As for the question: where to start? Anywhere? There are a thousand entrances to Gilles Barbier. His work never ceases to appear riddled and tentacular. You don’t ask such a cephalopod to hold out its right hand to you… (…) Above all, don’t start at the beginning by unrolling the works along the conventional slope of chronology. To begin at the beginning is always to foresee the end. Art suffocates and dies from too much historicity. History of art, history of philosophy, history of science, and so on. By teaching only that, we always miss the immanence of paintings and texts. So, Gilles Barbier, you have to go in like that, by the path that offers itself, the painting-connection of the moment. Then we’ll see how to map out his overabundant arsenal of images and ideas. The more heterogeneous his work, the more the multiplicities intertwine, and the more entrances there are. There is no end, no beginning: just a middle Pierre Sterckx in: Un Abézédaire dans le Désordre, 2008. (Éditions Du Regard). Read the full biography
