Exhibition views

“The Cockpit, the Ship, the View from the Porthole”.

Espace Claude Berri, Paris, 2008.

All Gilles Barbier is in this exhibition title: we are carried away by a vertiginous nautilus and watch the state of the world from its cockpit. The world? The great shipwreck, a festive and terrifying apocalypse. A luxuriance of themes: the raft (of the Medusa), a microcosm in its own right, the foam, the fall, the mussels, the epidermis, the text… What will we take with us: Chartres Cathedral, elephants, Balzac, quantum theory? Barbier’s constant obsession is with copying (cloning) and miniaturization; this compressed copy… Copying as “the stuttering of space”, he says. This is more than aviation. We’re in the middle of science fiction. The ship unfolds,” he says, “from its nodal points. We’re inside and outside. There are holes everywhere.

But the hole, for this delirious logician, is not an absence of matter! It’s a question of shifting gears. An orifice is matter-fast, and cheese is ideal matter for Barbier, or else earth, tapped by earthworms. For Barbier, the earthworm is the perfect image of the contemporary human individual, the consumer. The worm eats from birth to death. It digs and builds its habitat by eating and digesting its own reality. But according to Barbier, cheese is as eloquent as the worm in its cellular flexibility, its ability to change state, its impermanence. There’s a ” Cheese Room” in this exhibition, where Barbier evokes various scenes from Kubrick’s 2001, from the emergence of sapiens to the erasure of computer memory: “Stop Dave, I’m afraid, my mind is going…” says HAL.

Dozens of pages would be needed to illustrate the heterogeneous superabundance of such a work. Barbier is an artist of such multiplicity that he has even provided a “reserve”, or “ heaped riches ” within the exhibition. The new generation of artists of which he is one of the most brilliant and prolific representatives does not limit itself to the traditional role of solitary creator. Barbier is a designer, scriptwriter, producer and director of a kind of n-dimensional cinema. We encounter comic-book bubbles and Fra Angelico phylacteries, fractal theory and the illustrated Larousse, sharks and flatulence, banana skins and Californian surfing, and so on… But never does such an opera suggest the pitiful citationist agglomerations of post-modernism. Barbier’s astonishing freshness is called imagination. Contemporary art has been deprived of it for far too long.

Pierre Sterckx, 2008.