The most famous work by Gilles Barbier depicts the superheroes of the so-called Golden Age – the mid-1930s to the 50s – finally showing their age. The sculptural installation L’Hospice (Nursing Home, 2002) finds Superman bespectacled and hobbling about on a Zimmer frame, Catwoman wrinkled and slumped comatose in front of the TV and Captain America bloated on a gurney with a drip running out of his arm. This work, flavour of the month for a while on such click-hungry websites as Trendhunter and Io9, nonetheless provides an immediate portal into some of the Marseilles-based artist’s central preoccupations: time and its suspension, and the fantasy space between the two.
Barbier has long used his own image in his work, and he tends to be as honest about his own changing features as Marvel’s comic artists aren’t. So after an association of some two decades with the Vallois gallery in Saint-Germain (he was one of the very first artists they worked with), and as he approaches fifty, Barbier’s own ageing process can be mapped in a walk around Nathalie and Georges-Philippe Vallois’s storage space. The latest addition to Barbier’s catalogue of doppelgängers sits in a side room of the present exhibition. Still Man (2013) is a mixed media sculpture, 180cm long and 135cm high. This photorealistic self-portrait presents the artist slumped down in the forest, apparently for so long that he has become a part of its undergrowth – vines wrapped around his arm and moss growing from his skin, he is thoroughly immersed in foliage. Like his earlier reference to superheroes, what we are being presented with is again a fantasy about time: of having so much time simply to sit and think that you become almost reabsorbed into the environment.
Read the rest of my review of Gilles Barbier’s recent show in Paris, at Art Review.