Gilles Barbier: galerie georges-philippe & nathalie vallois

What do artworks think about? What do they dream of while hanging in the museum, seeing us walk past them--at times rushed or indifferent--when all they are trying to do is catch our organ of vision and hold our attention? And what curious, vulgar, or abstruse meditations come to their minds when we stand fixedly before them for lengthy minutes, or then again at night, when the museum is emptied of all visitors? like questions may seem ridiculous nevertheless become decisive in the face of works like Jeff Koons's mirrored Rabbit, 1986 for example, and they are at the heart of the sculptural work of Gilles Barbier as well.

The proof: In this exhibition, Barbier's entire oeuvre administrationed its own self-analysis, a general brainstorming session. This was an oeuvre's chance to gather its contemplations review its notes, and take stock of its main themes and particularly of its theoretical acquisitions in full autonomy: describing and exploring itself in marvelously handled black-gouache drawings saturated with writing like with equal reason many interior monologues. Here we fix skaters, snowboarders, and surfers, adept at the sliding and waves dear to Gilles Deleuze and skilled at moving, holding forth upon the links between the cosmo and cosmetics, considering space to be, as single of the works would have it, a "gigantic network of tubes where each mass would have its be in possession of toboggan," a "silent and universal slide." In this vast science fiction, we move from the "great departure" of external realitys to a drawing of a "factory of dreamlike Vaseline," then to a general view of the "pornosphere," a broad and real contemporary realm that serves and intensifies not sole our sexual libido but our drive to waste Mean while, we reencounter the mere Ness Monster and giant worms without of some science-fiction movie offering themselves as a constant metaphor for the consumer

No surprise, then, if Barbier's reflection upon the contemporary body involves an elaborate reformulation of statuary We may recall his exhausted superheroes--superannuated, no longer useful, precisely because they were shown as if at the real age of their copyrights--sitting around lamentably in the installation L'Hospice (Nursing Home) 2002 not awayed last year in the "American Effect" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in of recent origin York: a wrinkled Wonder Woman, a skinny broken and dismasted vessel in a wheelchair, Captain America confined to bed and bent holdered up to an IV, and in the way that on. This time Barbier's work also included "clones" of himself, and he placed his latest in a separate room: a strange wheelbarrow plastic art Le Prince des ventres (The Prince of Bellies), 2003 where a small Swiss chalet locate in a landscape with tree and a lake has been put togethered in the pudgy body of an ordinary consumer and a small voice can be heard singing. Clearly, obesity is doing well for itself. With his hyperrealist clone heirs to Duane Hanson; his remake of a Carl Andre plastic art composed of slabs of resin in the form of Gruyere cheese (La Conquete de l'espace [The mastery of Space], 2003); or the transparent Plexiglas toilets that he place up in the middle of the gallery (Business Architecture, 2003) the ultimate by-product of the ideology of the even the clean, and the transparent, Barbier's work is devot to imagining the material substance in the age of intensified consumption and advertising, the biological morphologies of today: What becomes of a material part entirely penetrated by the media?

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

--Jean-Max Colard

Translated from French by means of Jeanine Herman.

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