Habiter. Gilles Barbier

Gilles Barbier’s exhibition Inhabiting brings together around forty works, combining creations made for the occasion with existing pieces, the oldest of which date from 1992. Gilles Barbier’s exhibition Inhabiting brings together around forty works, combining creations made for the occasion with existing pieces, the oldest of which date from 1992. Through emblematic series such as Les Pions and Inhabiter la Peinture, which have marked the artist’s practice since its beginnings, and more recent bodies of work such as Inhabiter la Viande, Stasis and Naufrages, the exhibition highlights the central motif of his work: inhabiting. Without claiming to be a retrospective, it reveals the deep coherence of a practice that has questioned ways of occupying and perceiving the world for more than thirty years, bringing together initial gestures and contemporary concerns. The Game of Life as a Generative Principle This principle appears very early in Barbier’s work, notably through the foundational device of the Game of Life. Inspired by a simple and fertile algorithmic model, this protocol becomes for the artist a driving force for formal and conceptual proliferation. He continually develops its potential in numerous series, following a branching logic characteristic of his work. Critic Pierre Sterckx observed that Gilles Barbier’s work never advanced by “project,” but by “growth.” In the museum’s three rooms, large paintings, sculptures and collages punctuate an organic itinerary structured around three essential themes: inhabiting painting, inhabiting the body, inhabiting time. Shifting the question from “what” to “where” One of Barbier’s most distinctive gestures is to approach things not as objects, but as places. Body, language, medium: everything becomes space. By shifting from what to where, the mental territories of painting, sculpture and flesh become landscapes in which to stay. This attention to place immediately raises the question of its occupation: owner or tenant? But of what, exactly? Of one’s memories, one’s consciousness, the world? Barbier seeks neither to conquer nor to establish hierarchies: he visits, observes and moves into whatever he encounters. His works seek to inhabit reality, to use it without possessing it, often with humor, sometimes with dread.