Fatrasie: Victor Garel
It’s a full-blown free-for-all among bureaucrats in suits and ties. Dressed in subtle variations of black, their faces tinted blue, they hurl insults at each other over a single lettuce leaf. The lettuce leaf lies in a porcelain plate like a lacquered duck. Eyes without faces watch this Kafkaesque scene unfold, whose only possible escape is perhaps the emergency exit green like the lettuce.Victor Garel is almost selftaught in painting. After a few years of fruitful wandering, he turned to university studies in art history. He had always drawn. He then went to Scotland to refine his practice, pursuing a Master’s degree at the Glasgow School of Art.
A regular visitor to museums and libraries, he recounts his encounter with contemporary creation through his discovery of the work of Louise Bourgeois. Barely 15 years old, he is struck by the domestic universe, at once direct and violent, that emanates from her sculptures, from the maternal figure embodied by the monumental spi- ders. Today, his images arrive on his canvases very intuitively, barely filtered by a few sketches in a notebook. The faces of the characters resemble those of icons, identical today to what they were several centuries ago. It is this permanence of images that fascinates Victor Garel. Since a course in Byzantine art history, he has decided to collect them—another way for him to reconnect with a childhood memory.
His large compositions are often enigmatic. In one of them, a standing figure a Scotsman in a kilt seems to wait for the disorder at his feet to subside. One character spills out of a house on his back. Another, a determined walker, pulls a skate by the tail, a nod to Chardin or to a fishing anecdote in Brittany. His head upside down, one of them tries to see his neighbor furiously hanging from a red telephone from the 1980s. While a boxer with the fists of Shiva desperately tries to strike the birdplanes circling in the sky, in front of a huge threatening ocean liner, surrounded by a halo of bluish light. The scene is tense, as in this other canvas in which a horse puppet carrying three riders is conveyed by three humans whose polished shoes can be seen. They move forward in a jungle that resembles those of Henri Rousseau. A character leaning out of a window, ins- pired by a scene of Piero Della Francesca, tries to steal his hat (that of Pierrot) from another boy whose feet sink into the ground. Carnival masks and a strange dog with electric eyes speak of the masquerade.
Closer to the aesthetic of Fernand Léger, with umbrellas open above their heads or folded at their feet, figures seem to juggle with red suns. Egyptian suns? In front of a sky dotted with small white clouds, these figures perhaps await an indeterminate ritual among factory chimneys. On the left, some are calm. On the right, it is turmoil.
Small-format canvases have escaped from these battlefields: a basket of eggs, a rat climbing over a character asleep under his duvet, a bat hanging from the ceiling, a cat watching them.... A magpie has made its nest with nails. A painter at his easel receives a punch coming from the sky in front of a red theater curtain. Scissors are leaning against a menhir, with a quail egg in front of it in Breton, egg is said “vie,” he specifies.
Among the works from his beginnings, brought back from Glasgow, a canvas whose composition closely recalls a work by Dana Schutz brings together a large number of his influences and quotations from his masters such as Giotto, Philip Guston or Nico Pirosmani. Finally, in a large-format drawing that says much about his universe, a man is sad because he would like to put on his shoes but he has no feet. Alice’s teapot is surmounted by a house. Four knives have been planted in the background. A fish floats, but not enough to make serenity prevail.
Anaël Pigeat
