Galerie Eva Vautier is pleased to present Tout autour, l’eau, the first solo exhibition by Benoit Barbagli at the gallery.
Galerie Eva Vautier is pleased to present Tout autour, l’eau, the first solo exhibition by Benoit Barbagli at the gallery. Benoît Barbagli has a protean artistic practice, drawing his works from nature. He questions the ethics of the image and the imprint it leaves. In the artist’s images, most often taken in natural settings and in company, are reflected the sharing and the privileged bond he maintains with his environment. Since 2018 he has worked with the collective PALAM (from the Latin “en présence de”), of which he is one of the founding members. View of the exhibition Tout autour l’eau, Benoît Barbagli, 2022, Galerie Eva Vautier, Photo © François Fernandez For Elodie Antoine, art historian, “Benoît Barbagli’s work questions the contemporary possibilities of a photographic writing through performance. He offers us a photographic narrative whose subject remains enigmatic. Who is its narrator? The author, the performers? The artist seems deliberately to blur the trail, leaving the viewer the place that Roland Barthes gave to the reader – the reader is born at the death of the author. The aquatic worlds staged by Barbagli take us back to primordial states and forms: amniotic fluid, the circle, in which bare bodies move and coil. An intimate embrace with nature, an ancestral state of humankind in its close and privileged bond with the elements: water, air, earth. Elements to which his sculptures echo, from the curve of rising waters to the expansion of life since the birth of humanity, passing through variations in terrestrial temperatures. Barbagli’s photographic and sculptural works question our being in the world, its mutations and metamorphoses, its possible alternatives too.” BENOÎT BARBAGLI | STATEMENT. The harder the collapse strikes, the more joy will be necessary. Do not see in these words a Don’t Look Up* averting its gaze from causes, but rather a tool for revolutionary use. Joy is the binding agent of our interactions, a power to act, to build collectively. By making the common possible, it becomes an act of resistance. Without this commons, ecological thought loses its reason. As planetary boundaries are crossed one by one, what can joy do? What can a few bodies submerged, swimming in a circle underwater, without clothing, without tools, without words, do? A few frenzied movements to reach the surface, take a breath and dive back down, holding their breath, weightless: All around the water, all around life. Together, naked, immersed in water, the sophistications of our culture come undone, and the immediate relations of which nature is the first bond, ever-present and insurmountable, are redrawn. When creating an image, what is sought is neither composition nor visual or conceptual originality. It is the harmonic resonance of the bonds and emotions between individuals surrounded by nature that composes an aesthetic: an ethics of perception. Statement, Tout autour l'eau. By Benoit Barbagli. ELODIE ANTOINE | Benoit Barbagli – of…
