Gilles Barbier — À propos — Slash Paris

Gilles Barbier arrived in France at the age of twenty. He has established a body of work that he defines as neither criticism, nor “painting of the world”, nor problematics, but as fictions.

The distance he systematically introduces through the “intelligence of the work” gives him considerable flexibility; embarrassing for someone who wants to simplify the whole into a coherent unit.

His career, including the rigorous copying of the dictionary as background noise, has covered bodies defined as clones, “mediagenic” spaces with bedridden super-heroes, the “pornosphere”, the “corrected” worlds.

Gilles Barbier produces a continuous flow of drawings and images fed by texts and other thought-provoking objects and ideas. Amongst these we find cheeses, relay batons, bananas, worms, burrows, space tubes, vaseline, the atomic bomb, cosmetics, obesity…

Gilles Barbier patiently creates works that, without nostalgia, translate the tragic bursting of the human being and the violent expulsion out of his own self.