Exhibition views

Production Machines, 2021.

Musée Soulage, Rodez. (Curator: Benoît Decron).

In Rodez, we present installations, sculptures, models, gouaches… All of them spread out and rise up in the tightly-fitted space of the temporary exhibition room (height, volume, circulation): the Burrow, a contemporary thebaid (2004), the Mega Model (1998 -2020), a destabilizing teenager’s dream, a subtle organism with many details and ramifications, the Fart Organ (1996), an egotistical wind tunnel, the Soups, inextricable, chatty gouaches, and the monumental Black Box (2015), a merry-go-round of picture rails – 96 black-and-white gouaches, singly, in pairs, sixes and eights – on which visitors can climb and be carried along. Magic Roundabout, a troubling and educational theater. The Box, a spinning world, offers a panoramic display of Black drawings If you stand patiently in front of it, you can see them all. The work is reconstructed for the first time since the Eco System exhibition. at La Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille. While Barbier has established himself as a sculptor, he also has the authority of a painter.

Gilles Barbier claims to revolve around two concepts: avatar and suspension. For him, a succession of operations results in the production of a contingent, reproducible, permutable or exchangeable, modifiable work of art. All its potential versions form the ecosystem of the work itself. “This idea prompts me to think that a work can be replayed (or ruminated) in an organ that recycles the exclusive process of the “or” (determining its emergence) into a circular whole linked by the energy of the “and” produced by the sum of its versions.” These are the Production machines, coherent and surprising at the same time, on the assumption that they will never end. Behind the expression of the grotesque lies eschatology, man’s ultimate ends. And our origins. As you can see, the Production machines gathered here are the successive processes of a modus operandi, the stages of a reflection on a work begun 25 years ago. In the first images of the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”, monkeys swirl like electrons around a strange monolith that has fallen from the sky and is planted in the ground: surprise (amazement), interest, exploration. In all modesty, we’d like the exhibition to evoke similar sensations.

Benoit Decron.