On the occasion of its next (very) contemporary art session on Thursday 28 January 2021, PIASA will be highlighting the work of French artist Vincent Gicquel, painter of derision.
"The only possible subject is me, my relationship with the world. There is nothing in my painting that is not linked to the painter that I am, nothing that is not directly related to the very process of creation. Each painting serves to hold a discourse on the only subject with which it can be associated: the act of painting. All my characters are busy with indefinable tasks, mobilised in the exercise of an activity that seems to be the whole reason for their existence. Day after day they tirelessly repeat the same gestures with application, determination and seem to be the only ones who really know what they are doing. There is nothing enigmatic, nothing to solve, nothing to understand.
I just try to bring to light the absurdity of any act, and only insist, canvas after canvas, on their indispensability. The meaning will always escape its pursuers and every attempt to explain it will be doomed to failure. Only a certain amount of humour or a real passion for the absurd can help us appreciate my painting and the world we live in. Nothing has ever really changed and nothing will ever change. My gaze and the work to which I am attached just allow me to shift things a little. People will ask themselves the questions they want. About their own condition, their place in the universe, their certainties, about death and the importance of humour. For if there is indeed nothing to understand in this world, there are many laughable things. »1
1Citation Vincent Gicquel
Born in 1974 in Normandy, Vincent Gicquel spends his childhood building huts and, when it rains, reproducing in his father's studio the paintings of the Masters of modernity (Van Gogh, Monet or Picasso). He then develops a very deep attachment to oil painting and a little later to tragic philosophy. A reader of Schopenhauer, to whom philosophy brought nothing but a lot of money, Vincent Gicquel chose to become a painter because he said, "I had too much humour to be a serial killer. »
Vincent Gicquel (born 1974)
Voeu, 2019
Estimatd: 25 000 / 35 000 €
Vincent Gicquel's work is promoted in France by the Thomas Bernard Gallery/Cortex Athletico, Paris, and in Germany by the Carlier Gebauer Gallery, Berlin. The solo exhibition C'est pas grave, at La Criée - centre d'art contemporain, Rennes, in parallel with the presentation of his works from the Pinault collection during the exhibition Debout! at the Couvent des Jacobins, Rennes, in 2018 marks an important turning point in his career.
