Paintings

What came out of the hat today.

If you want your ideas to be clean, , change them like your shirt.

F. Picabia

Over the past thirty years, Gilles Barbier has produced more than 1,000 statements. By “statement”, he means a short sentence that may or may not, in its interpretation, generate a text, a work, a series of works, or extract new versions of existing works. Often accompanied by a production protocol, the artist calls this device a Production Machine. According to what he says in his many interviews, these machines constitute a formidable access ramp to anything and everything; a veritable Cap Carnaveral for the “get out of your head” program.

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In 2015, the following statement is activated: Do what comes out of the hat today, and change hats every day.

The hatis the head.Today, a clock frequency. As is often the case, the idea is to combine the power of doing with a freedom that contradicts the notion of project, too often accompanied by a heavy, worn-out, compartmentalizing lexicon. To achieve this, I adopt strategies that provoke fragmentation within a given framework, where each fragment can be collected. I call this principle the production machine. Associating machine and subjectivity has long tormented me, at least since artificial intelligence has made it possible to clarify their interaction. What comes out of the hat today acts as such, and I don’t have to worry about the objects it produces, just be attentive and dedicated to them.
Extract from an interview with Gaël Charbau (2017).