Guillaume Gattier

Guillaume Gattier was born in 1982 in Annecy (FR), he lives and works in Marseille (FR)

Guillaume Gattier is a young artist who has been based in Marseille for several years, after leaving the École des Beaux-Arts in Annecy before completing his final year. Much like this act of departure, Gattier’s practice embraces a certain nonchalance—he is more interested in what is currently unfolding than in the outcome of things and processes.

His works reflect this mindset, and although they may appear finished, they often seem abandoned, incomplete, or even merely sketched out. This loosened relationship with time paradoxically gives his works a particular density—each one containing an idea, the promise of a realization, and a potential for incompleteness. This unresolved state, much like Chinese painting’s refusal of fixed representation (which would go against the Tao’s vital principle of indeterminacy), preserves the latent power of the materials used and reveals unexpected narrative and imaginative potentials.

Flight, slippage, forgetfulness, waste, uncertainty, remorse, loss… these are some of the key notions that shape the sensitive vocabulary of Gattier’s work. A dilettante artist in the vein of a Maurizio Cattelan fleeing his own exhibition, Gattier toys with the viewer’s expectations and questions in order to better stage the fragmentary nature of existence.

Ultimately, his works evoke the eternal figure of vanitas, which he endlessly reconfigures using means that are sometimes excessive, sometimes trivial, in a game of chance that underscores the arbitrary nature of the artist’s choices—and, by extension, of life itself.

An observer of the everyday, of the banal, of what has been discarded, Gattier draws upon popular and underground cultures as the raw material for his pieces. Photographs found on demolition sites, children’s drawings soaked through, charred tree branches, old magazines, second-hand vinyl records—all objects that seem themselves to have been abandoned by their former owners—are given a second life in Gattier’s installations, a cruel reminder of the potential failures of their first.

Gattier’s works avoid pathos only through the virtuosity of his staging: a celebration of intellect as a survival tool in the face of the inescapable tragedy of the human condition.

Text by Dorothée Dupuis
Translation: Triangle-Astérides