Vincent Gicquel | Brothers in Arms

About

Gicquel constructs an autonomous, tragi-comic world in his works. He considers each painting that he makes to be a fragment of an internal monologue, describing them as “both x-rays of our world and cross sections of my own brain.” For Gicquel, painting and living occupy the same continuum.

Both activities exist in the same relationship to the world—existence, like painting, has no other goal than doing it.1

In "Brothers in Arms", Gicquel presents a series of new small and medium format oil paintings in which he further develops the androgynous, humanoid figures that have populated his canvases in recent years. While earlier works captured these figures engrossed in banal, pointless routines or oddly dispassionate sexual configurations within candy-colored landscapes, Gicquel’s newest works present these characters in complete isolation. The expression brothers in arms is used to designate people who have served together in some sort of conflict, most typically war. The term denotes an extreme closeness, a shared sense of time and space that shapes the way one views the world. It’s difficult at first to ascertain what kind of intimate bond might link Gicquel’s figures beyond a shared sense of solitude. With few exceptions, each figure is painted alone and depicted against a background of the same color palette that threatens to subsume them. Painted from the shoulders up, their limbs are not visible and they have little space to operate within. This formal choice seems to deprive the characters of their capacity to act—yet they nonetheless seem to respond and feel. Viewed together, the portraits form a continuum of suspended states of emotion: bemusement, horror, fear, surprise, sadness, and self-satisfaction. Gicquel has claimed in interviews that his characters are egotistical and out for themselves—and that they have no links to the world, and even less to the people, that surround them. Yet in meeting our gaze, these strange creatures bridge the gap between painting and life, as if to claim the viewer as their “brother in arms”—another witness to the paradoxical uncertainty of the human condition.