Benoît Barbagli’s workshop is vast. Ocean, river and mountain are his performative spaces. Art emerges there, a vital emergence within the collective. His plural and multi-medium propositions blossom in itinerant gestures. Art moves in nature.

In his peripatetic devices, the path makes sense, the nudity is candid, and the work manifests itself in surges. The configurations are multiple, the rituals varied and, often, the expedition that leads to the artistic experience is done with visual artists. His camera is described as “flying”. It is passed from hand to hand and the signature is frequently shared or collective.

Benoît Barbagli explores the borders. It draws from the substratum of creation in search of its germinations from a mutualized food. The Mountain creates as much as the sea, as the artist friend, by its presence, by its movement, by the principle of life, by essence random, which moves it. Art seizes moments of the Living that always manifests itself where we do not expect it, in unheard of sequences that we sometimes struggle to grasp in their unfolding. With humor, lightness, strength and delicacy, Barbagli invites us to sketch the moments and incites us to consider them in their ephemeral beauty. An ode to Vitality.

The four elements are recurrent. They animate and structure the artist’s series in Heraclitean spurts. Fire, water, air, earth. Benoît Barbagli’s universe is poetic, polysemic, playful and funny. He likes to “hijack the Text expo Under the chaos life references of culture to return them to nature.” What makes a work? The project? Its manifestations? He orchestrates meetings, a community is created around the project and the creative space becomes a joyful pretext for life.

To pay homage to the living, to give him his place, the artist erases himself, il puts in scene, puts himself in scene and yet fades with a lot of elegance, the ego dissolves in the interconnected, I is another. Benoît Barbagli, it is the romanticism reversed. His return to nature takes place in a peaceful setting where egotism is annihilated, where praise is stripped of pomp, where art emerges in its simplest expression.

In the Mediterranean Sea in winter, a hand holds a bouquet in the icy water, the fertile sea is also deadly lately. Eros and Thanatos come together, amorous ardor and mortuary homage are the two sides of the same mirror. In an attempt at love with the torch, a naked body throws itself off a cliff, the diver’s tomb or unquenchable passion? The moment is in suspense, an unresolved space subject to the projections of the viewer. The grace, the fall and the rebound – or not, are all part of it. Bodies carry a stone under the troubled surface of a lake, emergence of a new Atlantis or Sisyphean perspective of an inevitable collapse after an umpteenth attempt? The artist and his acolytes bring their stone to the visual building.

Benoît Barbagli is the sherpa of the mountain, he transports his canvases there so that the latter creates. It removes the museumization of the woman’s body by returning it to the earth. It captures the spark igniting the beam. He walks on the anthropocene by questioning the stars, born of chaos.

Text written by Pulchérie Gadmer on the occasion of the exhibition Under the chaos, life