carlier | gebauer

Vincent Gicquel

Exhibitions at carlier | gebauer

Biography

Texts

COLLECTIONS

Collection Pinault
Artothèque de Pessac - Les arts au mur
Centre d'art Chasse-Spleen

Interview with Marie Canet the 28th of August, 2009 

Can you tell me about your relation to painting? In what manner does it satisfy the fabrication of your images?

I think I adopted oil on canvas for its « classical » side. In each of my paintings, I insist on the unalterable character of things, on the fact that nothing has ever changed and nothing will. Painting is in temporal, it appeared with the cavemen and has got through all revolutions; my painting questions the man, his destiny... A judicious choice which resembles to a bad choice... to play with all those small insolvable contradictions. I love all those things which we cannot really define, which slip continuously out of our grasp, it is the background of my work. Nevertheless, I don't thick that art has much to do with the choose of medium, art - it is to live while I spend my days painting or hopping on one leg, it is exactly the same thing...

And your relation to words?

When I start a painting, I have sometimes a vague sketch or a drawing of a character, the title appears often only later. I have a way of thinking and a way of seeing the world that has an influence on my language and my words. Some of them are extremely important, such as « absurd », « dead », « art », « sense »... When the painting takes a direction that seems interesting to me, often the title imposes itself... there, again, I dont choose much, everything becomes evident, the painting functions, and the title as well. Their etymology is very important for me, I like titles that seem to indicate something simple, precise and which prove to be much richer that we think. In the painting Corps, for instance, the word body (corps) seems to indicate the pink and soft mass that the man has just discovered, it evokes dead bodies that we find after a catastrophe... In fact, this painting insists a lot more on our relation with body in general, our relation to the other and to sexuality... The title Corps was an evidence... I made the choice of liberty but concerning the rest, we don't really choose, things impose themselves naturally or how it suits them and I don't have much to do with all this...

You assimilate sometimes painting to a gastric exercise...

When I paint, I conduct myself the same way as a surgeon does, with the same diligence. I need to say something in a very precise manner, that is why my titles don't include articles, I don't want them to be a word from the dictionary to which I bring my definition... I assemble thus a certain vocabulary, a form of definition of what I am, or more precisely, of what I am not (a definition by default) Canvas after canvas, I approach myself... I dissect...


You told me about a mechanical aspect, a machine and an organic aspect... it is very relevant... I talked about tomographic imagery in one of my texts, it is exactly this, the imagery of my paintings is close to medical imagery. They are simultaneously X-rays of our world and images of my own brain...


I think that there really is a link between my paintings and digestion. My work could be an instruction of how to digest the world, in sort. I would like my paintings to also function in that sense, as if they were pieces of a big machine which represents at the same time the mechanical side of reflection (a brain at work) and the organically side (the one of digestion on a large scale). We must imagine not the peristaltic movements of the stomach, but the movements of a brain which reflection after reflection arrives to digest a certain aspect of the world to better bear it... In fact, art and humor would take on the role of gastric juice...

What preoccupies so intensely the figures of your paintings?

I think that my characters act (rather egoistically) for themselves. Their actions don't have a relationship with the world that surrounds them and even less with people that surround them. When I speak of general indifference, it is because the looks never meet each other... It is in that solitude of Sisyphus where we affair. My characters are the condemned, like me, they never really know what they have come here to do, I think that they don't even try to understand. They do what seems important to them... They debate with oil painting (this famous soft material), using inappropriate tools...


Each of my paintings functions as a fragment of an internal monologue... for me, there is a link between the soliloquy and the purely mechanical repetition of our gestures; we are all puppets, all in the same shit... But there is nothing negative about it! I don't criticize anything, I don't rise up against anything. There is nothing cynical about my laughter, and nor is there anything barbaric in my way of dissecting the world; I simply turn everything that surrounds me to joke, without sparing my work nor the ridiculous man that I am... I have finally a great vitality that oscillates between laughter, indifference and a salutary serenity. I owe everything to my way of seeing the world, and by the way, there is only one way of seeing the world, the one to see it as it is!