Review of
Gilles Barbier
by Joseph
Nechvatal
Carrˇ d'Art -Museˇ d'Art Contemporain
http://musees.nimes.fr/carreart/ac-carre.htm
May 31st
to September 17th, 2006
Gilles BarbierÕs remarkably
ambitious exhibition at the Carrˇ
d'Art Museˇ d'Art Contemporain in N”mes (Southern France) plays pithily
with many current intellectual strands which interest me: net culture,
artificial intelligence, image profusion, micro-organisms and science fiction
(among others). But what struck me as most exact to its weird visual
propositions was its deep reflection (one might even say brooding) on the theme
of ignobility, and this grubbily shifted something in my head.
In this multi-gallery
installation Barbier mixes frantically composed hand-made graphics - which
display a mordantly witty obsession with language - and often wistfully
perverse hyper-real sculptures. Immediately one feels his sense of dark humor -
despite it being tied to a grueling work ethic. A peripatetic mind is clearly
sensed behind such diverse, but hyper-linked, work - even while sensing an
overall conveyance of longing connected to an acute awareness of death. If I
may presume to decode such a wide range of ideas and styles used here, I would
say that Barbier is attempting to give us a visual free verse for which we are
unprepared, a visual sagacity that tests the limits of form and stretches the
bounds of meaning by recasting our experiences of encountering wildly
disjunctive data on the internet into the sumptuously physicality of negation.
Taken as a lapidary whole,
BarbierÕs work delivers this punch of negation by tying together methods of
insouciant informality with a visceral camp irony: at turns hip and flamboyant
- then turning towards the morally outrageous. Art here physically embodies the
disappearing ephemeral we associate with electronically provided information
today on the internet, and the flickering of its translucent form. Still the
viewer is expected to work devotedly to solve the visual conundrums supplied
here, to supply mental transitions between the diverse and massive assortment
of graphics and sculptural elements (which supply the hooks). One must
fabricate a complicated forensic story out of this grisly mˇlange, which keeps
slipping in and out of idiosyncratic narration. And that recitation keeps
turning back into one about stinking death, that strange incurable affliction.
Humiliating death in all its undifferentiated fabulousness, by which I mean its
essentially nasty comedy. Funny, difficult death then, which while pulling down
our pants and revealing our soiled undies, keeps everyone laughing (or at least
gurgling).
But also there is here an
awareness of impertinent splendor in the tranquility of decomposition, which
makes it all seem faintly heroic in face of deathÕs inexorability. We know of
its putrid ignobility but will not give in. And this is what gives the work a
strange sense of dignity, which asserts lifeÕs primacy over death. Life, plus
art, as paradox, because it is beyond narration and words.
So this is art which does not
merely help us pass the time, but which enlivens it, if we surrender to its
fearful difficulty. BarbierÕs work here provides the chance to do the
counter-fearful thing, to look at what we fear so that effort will help release
us from fearÕs grip. Then we can get over it and so enjoy life all the more.
Then the ignobility of death can be ignored, and dignity restored Š for now.
vieille
femme aux tatouages 2002 by Gilles Barbier
Emmental
Head, 2003, by Gilles Barbier
cire, mˇtal, acrylique, pigments, 45 x 35 x 20 cm. Collection
particuli¸re, Paris. Photo courtesy Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie
Vallois, Paris
Sans titre (mˇga
maquette), dˇtails, 2006, technique mixte sur papier, 21 ˇlˇments, chacun
environ 110 x 110 cm. Courtesy Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois,
Paris.