Hawaiian ghosts

Ghosts don’t just wear white sheets. If, in Scotland or in pale countries, the ghost drags his misery under pale liceuls, in Oceania he is adorned with colors and hibiscus… Beneath the sumptuous drapery may lie flip-flops… Gilles Barbier, one of the world’s greatest contemporary artists, was born in Vanuatu – a fact I learned when associating his name with “Hawaiian shirt” on a search engine. The flip-flop has become his signature. He puts them on the feet of his clones and other tired heroes. But he’s an artist of melancholy. Paradises are in the eye of the storm. Sea levels are rising. Islands are disappearing, and spectres are streaming in from beneath the turquoise sea. The artist’s comical ghosts are funerary monuments: the more colorful they are, the whiter the coral becomes.

Marie Darrieussecq: “Les couleurs des fantômes” (The colors of ghosts), 2017.