Victor Garel FR, b. 2000

Born in 2000, Victor Garel is a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. His practice explores the narrative possibilities of the pictorial medium. Built around a variety of elements - objects and characters whose shared traits lie in their symbolic potential and the ambiguity of their presence - his compositions intensify the chaos that governs their relationships.Coexisting within transitional spaces - enclosed gardens, undefined interiors, or dystopian urban parks - Victor’s characters seem driven by inner urgencies that bring them together or push them apart. When their trajectories collide, they produce encounters governed by intensity: mad love and fierce hatred, screams and tears, knives and caresses. A profusion of literary, pictorial, and cinematic references feeds the autobiographical substratum of Victor’s work and culminates in compositions of extreme symbolic density. The dominant feeling is perhaps strangeness. Strangeness in the unanimous seriousness displayed by characters engaged in absurd situations; strangeness in everyday objects turned into threats; strangeness in tightrope walkers crossing a clothesline, fish flying through the dining room, ghosts and UFOs - each welcomed with the same deadpan composure. These cryptic narratives, fragments of stories without endings, fundamentally question the absurdity of our everyday reactions to the chaos of the world. Strange and sometimes cynical, Victor’s works are nonetheless engaging. A dialogue emerges between the dryness of charcoal, the intensity of ink, and the fluidity of oil, within free and dynamic compositions. Victor’s practice is rooted in the accumulation - through drawing - of diverse narrative elements that later proliferate in his painting. This compulsive collection of shoes, spiders, missiles, and haunted telephones feeds a personal encyclopedia that the artist can then mobilize almost unconsciously. The construction of the painted works implies a refusal of construction, a kind of narrative automatism, hence the recurrence of certain forms whose symbolic richness Victor has not yet exhausted. The painting makes and unmakes itself, multiplies narratives, opens mysterious paths, and refuses univocal meaning. The result is joyful and chaotic, strange and funny - somewhat like the end of the world.

Armand Camphuis