carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce En Vie, a solo exhibition of new paintings by French artist Vincent Gicquel. This will be his second exhibition with the gallery. 

Man is, among other things, himself an animal. The characters that populate Vincent Gicquel’s canvases are a strange bunch that one would at first struggle to even describe as human. These strange, hairless figures resemble man, but lack any of the signifiers that might position them socially or connect them to life as we know it. Instead, naked and propelled purely by impulse, they occupy a universe completely their own: a liminal, dystopic kind of Eden. They are border creatures, dwelling on the horizon line, walls, a precipice. 

In his book The Inner Touch: Archeology of Sensation, Daniel Heller-Roazen writes that what separates man from other living beings also separates him from himself—every man carries a “nonman” within him. “From the living, feeling, speaking being that is man,” Heller-Roazen writes, “one abstracts a quality to be termed ‘human’ with propriety: the possession of reason (however one may wish to define the faculty). As conclusive as it may seem, such an
operation invariably produces a remainder, which cannot be attributed with any exclusivity to either human or inhuman beings. It is, quite simply, the element that is left over in human beings once one has withdrawn from them what is particularly human: everything in man, for example, that remains after, or before, the life of reason, everything in him that
cannot be said to owe its existence to the activity of thought.”