Echo System, 2015.

Friche Belle de Mai. Curator Gaël Charbau.

The first part of this exhibition offers a retrospective journey through almost 25 years of Gilles Barbier’s work. Drawings, paintings, installations, photographs: over 140 works are presented, all chosen for the light they shed on the artist’s “obsessions”.

“The second part of the exhibition is based on two monumental installations, formally very different, but closely related in terms of the concepts to which they refer. Permutation and combinatorics, chance and play – fundamental keys to this artist’s work – are used here in two installations which, while turning the exhibition into a series of unique moments, also highlight Gilles Barbier’s long work on his own memory and identity. Two pieces, ” The Black Box ” and ” Checkers ” are presented , plunging us into a world where indeterminacy and chance play essential roles. Where the spectator, mingled with the flow of combinations, sees moment by moment the composition of possible exhibitions.

Among the great unexplored surfaces, before the cosmos and the depths of the oceans, it is undoubtedly the depths of ourselves that remain the most remote territory. We are all, to varying degrees, surveyors, measurers and inspectors, but only a small delegation has been authorized to plunge in with both hands, to bring back a mysterious mud. For at least 30,000 years, we have entrusted artists, the scuba divers of the unconscious, with the weighty responsibility of bringing us back, whenever possible, something from the very depths of existence.

Gilles Barbier is no newcomer to the profession; he’s even got the makings of a hero, one who isn’t afraid to tackle symbols, clichés and personal demons. Imagining a retrospective exhibition of Gilles Barbier’s work is almost a challenge: his work is a constant challenge to time, space and the relationship between them. Beyond a simple chronological presentation, and to avoid any “ordering” of the artist’s career, we would like to offer viewers a kind of journey through the creative labyrinth that characterizes Gilles Barbier’s work. The exhibition would propose a language and materializations. The language would be the result of various conversations with the artist around and within his work. The materializations would be the “visible” part of the iceberg, a selection of well-known pieces as well as many more secret works. The exhibition as a whole could thus be thought of as a body whose multiple organs (spaces) constitute a form of life, or even a creative method of contemporary survival.

Gaël Charbau.