“Gilles Barbier” exhibition.

He prefers instability and slippage to the position of the Artist or Author, who stages a world parallel to reality, autonomous and perfectly asserted. He claims to be an open space swept by different motifs, which materialize in his works: words, brand names, questions, precepts, comic bubbles, reality correctors, a whole logorrhea inseparable from his work. Words come first. Indeed, he says: “I can even say that what is produced (and here I’m talking about my entire output) is basically just an illustration of the text. Or perhaps, more precisely, in a bizarre twist, the text is the illumination. This is how we should understand the frequently-mentioned tenant/owner opposition. Most of the plays assert the plural: the use of the clone is recurrent, multiplying the same character but, from play to play, developing a kind of role-playing: the drunkard, the tenderfoot… but always with the same face, that of the artist. This instability also bears witness to an age in which we can find many more images on the Internet than in any artist’s imagination.

From his long association with science fiction and comics, Gilles Barbier has developed a keen interest in fiction and an ability to imagine spaces and organisms: pockets of existence, ectoplasm… that embody the workings of abstract principles, developing a conceptually sustained yet highly figurative way of thinking. The work is nourished by a multitude of concepts in physics, artificial intelligence and information theory. He is interested in space adventure, anatomy, the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima or myth (the Lochness Monster). In a way, it appears as a hypertrophy of reasoning and intelligence, materialized by the journey through innumerable galleries, passages and themes that are constantly repeated. There is no evolution in the work, and no work is a stranger to the next. At any moment, the story can begin anew, often from an element of the work newly chosen to be the beginning. (…)

Extract from the presentation text by Françoise Cohen, Director of Carré d’Art de Nîmes.