From ‘metamorphosis’ we slide into ‘fantasy’, melding myths, legends, the wondrous and the fantastic; all things to do with imagination.
Thus, animals become human, men and women become beasts: sprawled on an armchair, a crocodile watches TV, still wearing his business suit; a scantily clad woman, wearing stockings and high heels, turns into a swan whose long neck mischievously slides between her legs, lifting her skirt some more.
Nothing is safe from Tomi’s eye and mind. “The cogs of Strasburg cathedral’s astronomical clock modeled my brain, fashioning the basis of my
elucubrations”; and women turn into mosques or cathedrals, columns and palm trees become garterbelts, rose windows become bustiers, and a judiciously placed door (naturally) invites us into the ‘house of god’… Even metaphors are transformed.
Tomi goes from anthropomorphism to trans- humanization with an unscrupulous and confusing ease, and peers into interstitial, forbidden realms; the result is a “baffling instability of classifications” (Roland Barthes).
Similar to an ever-changing cloud, Tomi’s Magnum Opus never repeats itself, guided always by doubt (“why not?”, he says) which opens the mind’s doors. But above all, the artist strays from reality, from “the fact that we are in an irreparable world”, personified by the piano losing its keys one by one in a black and white avalanche… or by the car, made of bones, a man attempts to fix.
“Living is learning to die” says Tomi.
To alchemists, death is equal to life in the process of transformation, the starting point. Then comes purification and recombination towards perfect union, fusion. Thus, what was dead comes alive. Tomi emphasizes that he was born out of death, having barely known his
watchmaker father – and has consciously ignored the passing of time, while revelling in an ambiguous relationship to the representation of death. Death is everywhere, both discreet, all-encompassing, sardonic, and cumbersome. In his work, death is the beginning and the end,
foreshadowing a transmutation.
Death is the void beyond a cliff off which a skeleton, wearing wings and aviation goggles, is about to jump; death also sneers behind its clown nose or gives a final blessing under a priest’s robes. But death is mostly this black shadow, ever behind us, or a large door opening unto  mountain vista where water flows in a long, calm river.
Agate Bortolussi

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.

« Ladies Only »is a reaction exhibition. An amusing response to Jacques Villeglé’s exhibition, « Jeune, Gay et Impudique », and his series of sexy posters from the late 1980s, relating to the prurient Pink Minitel period and its miscellaneous 36 15-prefi x coded gateway points to various directories including sex-related ones.With the provocative and garish aesthetic of the advertisements of the time, with girls’ open mouths and fl aunted breasts, « Ladies Only » answers by choosing to put the women really forward, those of the gallery and other guests, and by presenting a selection of works from 1988 to the present that explore the question of desire from a completely different viewpoint. With modesty, humor, restraint if not elegance, without apparent excess – or almost. A set of visions in a range of possible, minus pretentious demonstrations.Here, the works are not so easy to view. It is necessary to move around the lenticular photographs of Pilar Albarracín, which show the Spanish artist, with her authoritarian and severe air, in a corseted stripping session. It is required to lose oneself in the details of Bianca Argimón’s drawn imaginary scenes, recounting in a singular manner the condition of women and modern men. One must decipher the signs and the hidden meaning of Aurélie Gravas’ colorful compositions, that all speak in their own way of Love and Art. It is important to distinguish the profi les, the faces and the diaphanous forms that characterize the strength of the painting of Vivian Greven. It is essential to fl ush out the intruders in the small, falsely naive canvases of Lauren Coullard, who takes pleasure in having fun with rules, eras and genres

« Ladies Only » could have been called « Nanas », in tribute to the original one, Niki de Saint Phalle, an historical artist of the gallery included in the exhibition. « Ladies Only » is a misleading title; if women are alone at the controls, the men are no less present, or represented. Drawn here, carved there, their image is embraced. Nothing censored or forbidden on this side of the rue de Seine either.Neither boudoir nor gynoecium, « Ladies Only » is a space where desire fl ows in all its forms. A fantasy place where breasts spit milk and oil, where blouses open, where water regenerates, where mouths seek each other in a shades of green and pink and where dice throw themselves towards and ideal and dreamy quotidian. « Ladies Only » – but not only.Ladies Only

Barbara Soyer & Sophie Toulouse

For his third solo show at Galerie Georges- Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Vincent Paronnaud, a.k.a. Winshluss, well known by comic book aficionados for a few cult publications and the prize for best comic book at Angoulême (Pinocchio, 2008), looks at the love-hate ambivalence. This duality is already embodied in a recurrent pattern from his work, which he likes to refer to: Robert Mitchum’s two fists in the film The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton, one bearing the word «Love», the other «Hate». Winshluss usually only represents the «Love» fist in drawings or sculptures, separated from the body, like a mutilation. This time, he offers us both hands, which is probably worse, both 1:1 scale glued on a handrail, in a pale resin, like a 3D ghost, and installed at the height of the viewer’s eyes. These cut fists find an echo
in four paintings representing severed fingers surrounded by insects, perhaps the sign of a sexual frustration if we recall
the Freudian use Buñuel made of hands in An Andalusian Dog… Small phalluses wandering around on their own, but still ready to punch. At times, the only thing left is the shape of the fingers, or the holes in which to squeeze them: like this rumpled beer can, Next, or the American fist also tattooed with «Love» and nicely entitled Dans ta gueule mon amour!. Which shows that emptiness needs filling.

The materials and the manner in which he expresses this ambiguity recall the world of the Mexican calaveras, offerings in the shape of a skull often made out of sugar, a festive vision of the afterlife, and even a fertile one as the calavera is supposed to nourish the deceased. In Winshluss’ works, it is not sugar but ceramic or porcelain, with the same flowers as the ones found in calaveras, but fallen at the feet of the object, forming a kind of crown from which springs the skull or the fist. Variations on the tattoo and «glory» aesthetics. Death, or indeed love, is the great common lot, the vanity. Winshluss sometimes talks about the mediocrity of life: even when we think we have succeeded, we actually have failed, in a way. Perhaps then, this consciousness of failure could be a superior degree of success… In any case, there is always resurrection, redemption, may it be crucified on a piece of wood from Ikea.
It is almost like the triumph of death, if we accept the double meaning of genitive, objective and subjective. Death triumphs, as in The man who killed the sun, cheering fake cinema poster, but it is also a triumph over death: after all, the artist (who has represented himself as a warrior) is stronger than the sun. Once fire has been stolen, he lights it under his diorama’s characters from The Luncheon on the Grass, after Manet, which brings us back to the couple, except that it is a trio: Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband read by René Girard? We are not on the grass, but below it (we can see the roots, not the dandelions), and we are far past lunchtime: the presuppositions implied by Manet are unveiled (prostitution, money) and the woman on the painting, the only one in the exhibition, is armed. She has already sorted
the two men’s cases out. We would readily see in this (semi-)victory the feminist key to the Winshlussian macabre dances.

Fortunately, pile-up in art does not cause any damage, on the contrary, it fosters abundance and juxtaposition games of forms and times. Born out of the collision between a contemporary work and the abstract forms of camouflage pattern, Alain Jacquet’s painting Camouflage Hot Dog Lichtenstein (1963-1998) mixes an art history master work in both Pop and Nouveau Realist spirit. This work, nearly 6 meters wide, is a resumption of the work that concludes in apotheos the camouflages period of the artist, a painting cut into 300 pieces during a performance in 1963 at Galerie Breteau. In the same way, Jean Tinguely, with his Meta Kandinsky (1990), goes back to the historical «Méta-Reliefs», moving paintings from the 1960s, by setting into motion with small motors, little coloured and damaged elements certainly found in rubbish tips. Julien Berthier’s Malaxeurs Cinétiques, sculptures made of zinc-plated steel, re-enact the forms of abstract and kinetic art. These paint mixers, unexpected extensions of a drill, become real tools of artistic construction.
Keith Tyson’s Scrape Paintings, a series initiated in 2013, consists in re-working with paint already existing works: the superposition of topics and techniques from different periods engenders mysterious works in which patterns start interweaving. These interferences build complex surfaces formed by different images forming a connection and sometimes clashing. No trace of a shock in Pierre Seinturier’s pastel, but rather a worrying strangeness in this sacrificial scene in the middle of the woods where a drama is about to unfold. Finally, there must be at the end of this pile-up journey a possibility for repairs. Brazilian artist André Komatsu, makes the poetic proposition of «taping back» framed broken glass slabs with adhesive tape, which, like plasters, creates a new damaged landscape.