Laughing at Clouds

(Chimney Gallery, New York, 2019)

In 2019, Clara Darrason and Jennifer Houdrouge, who run Chimney Gallery (Brooklyn NY), invited Gilles Barbier to occupy this unusual space, a place for experimentation par excellence, the opposite of Manhattan’s White Cubes. The installation that followed, Laughing at Clouds, is a nod to Mary Poppins(Chim Chimney…) and her famous umbrella. In it, Gilles Barbier stages a forest of umbrellas, like so many derisory domes under which, in a fine shower of comic bubbles, intimate dialogues are exchanged, while external threats and aggressions are avoided.