Paintings

Metaphysical Suite.

The Metaphysical Suite comprises a large number of paintings (gouache and Posca on paper or polyester). The 140 x 250 cm formats, sometimes forming diptychs or polyptychs, can result in very large works (The Treasure, Cellular Automaton, Monde Mousse…).

The title of this series reaffirms that Gilles Barbier’s pictorial project goes beyond the realist dimension. As Françoise Cohen reminds us, “his ability to imagine abstract operating diagrams and to represent the mechanics of ideas enables him to develop a thought process that is conceptually sustained, but also highly figurative”. The motifs he conjures up are, without exception, speculative devices that envisage art as a World, with its own contingencies.

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From this position, he observes what makes movement, space, time, memory and identity. What limits or liberates, filters or obstructs, what makes sense or noise… From this dreamed space, the expanse sings as movement creases space. Engines are catatonic, the cosmos is foam, the hole is speed, language is Bacon’s cry, the copy is seminal. Speeds of liberation and stasis occupy the same niche, dreams are in alphabet soup and commerce is established as a metamorphic agent: cheese… Ownership doesn’t exist here, because everything can be duplicated, copied, everything is habitable, including painting itself… Objects, concepts and language are no longer appropriated, but embodied. Desires are pure acid, the monochrome melancholy of erasure and fiction maintained by homeostasis. Arches swollen with memory criss-cross the oceans, while singularities germinate between dysfunctional patterns. In that series, Gilles Barbier addresses the detailed descriptions and linguistic elements of this metaphysics of art; a metaphysics backed by a conception of art whose logic remains entirely unique to this artist.