The Galerie Eva Vautier is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Gilles Miquelis.
The Galerie Eva Vautier is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Gilles Miquelis. Following his first exhibition at the gallery, Vivre à en crever, in 2017, in which he explored the shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary through pictorial narratives imbued with contemplation, Gilles Miquelis returns with a new series of works on the meanderings of intimacy, with a cinematic approach. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier in 2001, Gilles Miquelis paints in oil, on a large scale, on canvases that sometimes unfold as diptychs, or in small formats, on tracing paper or rhodoid. After a phase of composition, his gesture is rapid in execution: he builds his paintings like snapshots. Behind a meticulous finish, the artist draws an off-kilter, caustic portrait of the present. His works belong to several public collections, notably that of the MAMAC (Nice). In 2023 he took part in Immortelle, an exhibition devoted to young French figurative painting at the MO.CO (Montpellier). In this new exhibition, Gilles Miquelis blurs the boundaries between the scabrous and the poetic. These scenes of everyday life, imbued with amorous tensions, metamorphose into paintings in which humour rubs shoulders with a palpable unease. Gilles Miquelis’s universe draws on an eclectic range of influences: from Picasso to Bukowski, by way of Bertrand Blier or Harold and Maude. The visual references borrowed from magazines such as Cinémonde engage in dialogue with striking pictorial compositions. Each work acts as a mirror held up to the viewer, placing them in an ambivalent stance of voyeur and witness. From fragments of love stories in the intimacy of a marital bedroom, to burlesque scenes in the middle of the street — such as a clumsy lover hanging from a window, being bitten by a dog (the husband’s?) — each painting distils a measure of humanity, sometimes touching, sometimes jarring. At the crossroads of humour and latent violence, Gilles Miquelis delivers a fresco of the contemporary human condition, where the “girl next door” becomes a film heroine, where exchanged glances reveal hidden truths, and where each canvas is a scene from a film of everyday life. Gilles Miquelis, Il s’était couché en colère contre sa femme et contre le monde, puis soudain il s’est réveillé, effrayé d’avoir appris à les aimer tous les deux trop tard, 2024, Oil on canvas, 230 x 190 cm (detail) Gilles Miquelis, or the discomfort of the sublime — text by Numa Hambursin, 2025 The love of painting makes one blind too, and sometimes prevents us from grasping the obvious subject. This applies to canvases so beautiful that the image — the one everyone sees — disappears, leaving in the mind only its material imprint: the texture, the framework, the arranged colours. What does the message matter if the language remains? It is a nasty flaw that threatens the initiate in love with a medium, because that medium carries away everything else. Here is the portrait of a child who…
