Press kit – All around, water
The harder the collapse hits, the more joy is needed.
Don’t think of these words as a Don’t look up* distraction from the cause, but as a tool for revolutionary use. Joy binds our interactions together, giving us the power to act and build collectively. By making the common possible, it becomes an act of resistance.
Without this common ground, ecological thinking goes haywire. As planetary limits are exceeded one by one, what can joy do? What can a few submerged bodies do, swimming in a circle underwater, with no clothes, no tools, no words? A few frantic movements to reach the surface, take a breath and dive back in, breathless, weightless: all around water, all around life.
Together, naked, immersed in water, we deconstruct the sophistications of our culture, redrawing the immediate relationships for which nature is the first, omnipresent, unsurpassable link. When creating an image, it’s not the composition, or the visual or conceptual originality, that’s important. It is the harmonic resonance of bonds and emotions between individuals surrounded by nature that composes an aesthetic: an ethic of perception.
Galerie Eva Vautier is pleased to present Tout autour, l’eau, Benoît Barbagli’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Benoît Barbagli’s artistic practice is protean, and he draws his inspiration from nature. He questions the ethics of the image and the imprint it leaves. The artist’s images, most often taken in the wild and in groups, reflect the special bond he shares with his environment. Since 2018, he has been collaborating with the PALAM collective (from the Latin “in the presence of”), of which he is a founding member.
For art historian Elodie Antoine, “Benoît Barbagli’s work questions the contemporary possibilities of photographic writing through performance. He offers us a photographic narrative whose subject remains enigmatic.
Who is the narrator? The author, the performers?
The artist seems to be deliberately blurring the lines, leaving the viewer the place Roland Barthes gave to the reader – The reader is born of the death of the author.
Barbagli’s aquatic worlds evoke primordial states and forms – the amniotic fluid, the circle, in which naked bodies move and coil. It’s a state of being at one with nature, an ancestral state of man in his close, privileged relationship with the elements: water, air, earth. Elements echoed in his sculptures – from the curve of rising sea levels to the expansion of life since the birth of mankind, and the variations in the earth’s temperatures. Barbagli’s photographic and sculptural works question our being in the world, its mutations and metamorphoses, its possible alternatives too.”
Download press kit (PDF) :
Photographs from the exhibition (by François Fernandez, HD quality):
Photographs of the works (web-press HD version on request at benoitbarbagli@fluxe.org):