Galleries in Paris

For his fifth solo show at the gallery, Winshluss (Vincent Paronnaud) confronts us with a burning reality.
Something is burning – the exhibition’s title – sets the tone: yellow, pink, red, everything indeed is on fire!
I told you so, he sneers… Through a new series of large-scale drawings, Winshluss asks a question present in his work as a cartoonist, a
visual artist or a filmmaker: what space is left for the individual in society? No answer to that query, other than the artist’s grating laughter: sometimes when I get up in the morning, I’m irritated by what I hear and see. Iʼm flabbergasted, I’m desperate and then, I laugh…
What else can I do? It’s all so absurd!
At the center of the gallery, it’s atomic war… An attack perpetrated against Barbapapa. Winshluss’ work is linked to childhood imagery, even in times of war. Children have always played war, nothing new here. In this world adrift, Barbapapa, who was born in 1970
(the same year as Winshluss) in a garden, like a flower, lacks his former glory. He seems to have undergone « a few mutations », and is now Barbapapatonic – a fluorescent monster with tentacles, the target of everyone’s gaze: a horde of armed men, tanks, and helicopters rushes
towards him. This installation, shown for the first time at the gallery, was specially created by Winshluss in 2013 for his major exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs – Un monde merveilleux (A Marvelous World).
This skull cackles in our faces, free and impertinent: it’s got the good life, a colorful life, between flaming butterflies and red-eyed roses with dilated pupils, in eternal complacency.
Ultimately, the skull seems far more into Peace & Love than Barbapapa, who finds himself trapped in the stench of a heap of garbage in another work on paper, or than White Man – Winshluss’s alter-ego -, trapped in an hourglass, caught short by time and life. In yet another
work, a smiley face with kissing lips lights up a neon-pink sky like a shooting star. It blazes towards a gray, rocky earth where a few daisies still remain; as do two beings, a man and a woman. They stand back-to-back, smiling at their smartphones. Networks are humanity in all its disgusting splendor, says the artist in a 2021 interview in Les Cahiers de la BD.
Ecology, social networks, nuclear power, war, pandemics, Winshluss combines them all,
analyzing the mess that is mankind.
Something is burning…. You can laugh or cry. Winshluss offers us the chance to do both at the
same time!
Agate Bortoluss