Gilles Barbier’s art is simultaneously a word on the tip of the tongue, an idea at the back of the mind, and a chiaroscuro between two intervals of light. There is no “window on the world”, a metaphor applied to painting ever since Alberti forgot to close his; with Barbier there is a skylight in a cosmos as singular as it is infinite, a thought that leads to a system, as extraordinary as it is abundant, for re-enchanting the world.

For his 12th solo show at the gallery, Barbier has created a series of drawings, the titles of which start with prepositions – Between, inside, behind, under, on… – that are making the (art) world think in every direction.
Born in Vanuatu (Oceania, South Pacific), the artist has always been fascinated by the sand drawings; these drawings take shape while a story is told, and are a form of writing that can be read in any direction. A “preposition” is a word that serves as a tool that syntactically links a word with the one preceding it, in a subordinating relationship. Position matters, explains Barbier. Between, inside, behind, under, on… These prepositions are all movements Barbier makes around subject matter buried within a complex system; like a wave that churns everything in a ceaseless flow, a maelstrom.

Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship, above me, flutters many-colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was the creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!
Arthur Rimbaud, extract from « Adieu », in A Season in Hell, April-August 1873, as translated by Paul Schmidt, and published in 1976 by Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row.
Exhibitions are born for thousands of reasons and one of them is sometimes a matter of friendship. From time to time, it is a question of elective affinity, this complex process that takes root in the history of medieval alchemy «to explain the attraction and fusion of bodies». (1) For my part, I have never wanted an exhibition to be too explicitly a slave to a subject. On the contrary, I prefer that it allows us to mix artworks that then become like beings and which, in some cases, produce a new aesthetic material, at the heart of the athanor. We do experiments, we do exhibitions, not presentations. We tell stories. It is all about letting your mind waver, like when you walk from gallery to gallery on a weekday with your fists in your pockets. Anger, drunkenness, snapshot of contrasts.

But at the local café, we realize that galleries are perhaps like borders, beaches or cliffs at the corner of the street, that separate us from the mainland of our urban boredom. Rare places in the city where anything remains possible.
From this beach, therefore, it seemed possible to show something of the bowels of this great golden ship, with multicolored flags, of which Rimbaud speaks.

Let the artists invent this excavation, in the present, all in the same boat: when it runs aground and breaks open, they invent themselves. So yes, come new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new languages. Let everything connect on the immaterial sand of the gallery. Whether they are known or not, it doesn’t matter, since they recognize each other. Careers, all mixed up, are as many fantastic journeys as history forgets, transforms into legends, or into posterity. This great golden vessel moves away obliquely as one approaches it: it multiplies and pulverizes to float better, like an intuition.

Curator : ALBERTINE DE GALBERT

PILAR ALBARRACÍN (Spain) . GILLES BARBIER (France) . FREDI CASCO (Paraguay) MARINA DE CARO (Argentina) . MATÍAS DUVILLE (Argentina) . ANA GALLARDO (Argentina) JUAN FERNANDO HERRÁN (Colombia) . MARTIN KERSELS (USA). HENRIQUE OLIVEIRA (Brazil) PAULINA SILVA HAUYÓN (Chili) & WALTER ANDRADE (Argentina) . VIRGINIE YASSEF (France) Paulina Silva Hauyón & Walter Andrade Henrique Oliveira Matías Duville

“Try a little tenderness!” as the song goes, like an invitation to sink into the well-padded recesses of a grandmother’s old armchair. Tenderness is one of the strongest components of human nature. It is neither sentimentality nor mushiness, yet its suggestion alone often triggers excesses of modesty or cynicism, the intensity of which clearly indicates that it is an essential emotion that touches our innermost core. Often denigrated and considered as the prerogative of children, old people and women — in short the weak, tenderness is nevertheless a great source of resilience in the face of violence carried out against body and mind.

In a lecture entitled “The Hollow of the Palm and Infrared Love,” the psychiatrist Jean-Pierre Klein. offered a definition of the term by default: “Tenderness is neither possession, nor submission — which objectify — nor passion, nor addiction —which amputate and merge fractions of subjects.” According to him, the subtlety in tenderness resides in the “right distance,” very slight but not nil, which separates two free subjects connected to one another..

Articulated around the notion of the “right distance,” this exhibition questions our connection to the edge, physical limits and otherness. At times rubbed raw or overwhelmed, as when an image, gesture, or word become unhinged and invasive, this limit shifts, whether one is the victim or the author of this shift.

It is the crossing of that tenuous limit between tenderness and the obscene that is at work in Spanish artist Pilar Albarracín’s video La Cabra, in which the artist dances with a goatskin sack of wine that slowly colors her folk costume blood red.

The embrace and the separation of bodies are also the subjects of the Californian artist Martin Kersels’ photographs entitled Tossing a Friend, which literally illustrates a brutal distancing of the artist’s body and the body of Melinda, his ex-partner. Conversely, with Posición Horizontal, a work by Colombian artist Juan Fernando Herrán, the other is not distanced but rather contained, assimilated. The series of nesting beds, each one fitting into another like Matryoshka dolls, suggests a mise en abîme of childhood or one’s innermost world, as if they were being placed in a sheltered spot.

Tenderness as protection and consolation runs throughout the work of the Argentinean artist Matías Duville. Coming straight out of his large-format drawings of unreal landscapes, a giant fish hook —of rusted metal and the size of a person —is gently resting on a blanket that brings to mind the same kinds of blankets found lying around in old houses, the simple sight of which is comforting.

Finally videos by Ana Gallardo (Estela) and Virginie Yassef (L’Arbre, in collaboration with Julien Prévieux), along with several other video works, illustrate the fragile space tenderness embodies, between movement and immobility, silence and crying out.

Albertine de Galbert

. Director of Inecat (Institut national d’expression, de création, d’art et de thérapie [National Institute of expression, creation, art and therapy]).

. Patrice van Eersel, “Une soudaine irruption de la tendresse ?” in Le Grand Livre de la Tendresse (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002), p. 23.