The Black Box, 2015.

The Black Box consists of four turnstiles on which 96 ” Black Drawings ” are displayed. This series, begun in 2002, forms a whole that could be compared to a logbook, a notebook. The black drawings transcribe the speculations, questions, hypotheses and research that accompany or precede the artist’s work. Conceived as a series of illuminations, they are systematically set against a black background, with motifs and texts painted in black gouache in “reserve”. The white of the paper acts as a source of light, like a neon sign or lamp, revealing the subject and drawing it out of the black all-over from which it seems to emerge. Arranged in this way, they create an immense night lit here and there by small lights, revealing details, texts and scenes.

These drawings are arranged on turnstiles whose speeds of rotation, tuned to generate a combinatorial space, highlight an essential notion in Gilles Barbier’s work: the suspension of the defined (even definitive) state of a thing in favor of an expanse that encompasses all possible states of that same thing… No longer a hanging, but its exponential.