Thibault De Gialluly

Thibault de Gialluly was born in 1987, he lives and works in Paris (FR)

Let’s be nonchalant, let’s act like it’s nothing.

A few stolen moments, a few ideas realized as they come: drawings, collages, wordplays, insignificant extensions, interwoven with photojournalistic images. Since activism would already mean placing oneself within a political framework, he does not assert—he always suggests, as an “emancipated spectator” for whom effectiveness lies not in direct confrontation but in infiltration or subversion.

Using juxtapositions, a sort of light surrealism in the age of alter-globalism, Thibault Scemama de Gialluly turns to current events to highlight (dotted lines only, of course) the tragic dimension added by the media. He feigns clumsiness, a naive tone surprised by the violence of reality. Thus, Le vieux Monde (The Old World) places a group photo of world leaders next to a description of an encounter with a tribe that has never had contact with Western civilization. A bit of white-out, a newspaper clipping, and a scrap of cardboard are enough to speak to the vast scope of the human condition—meager means in service of a bottomless reflection.

Born at a time when the word utopia had become Old French, and witness to the excesses of capitalism and power to which he doesn’t even pretend to adhere, he toys with the codes to better expose their arbitrariness. Rejecting the framed canvas, the wall-art-for-sale aesthetic, the notion of a finished artwork, he leaves the object—and its meaning—in suspension: sometimes evident, sometimes the result of a chain of impenetrable questions for the viewer, yet always carrying strong poetic force. His drawings are delicate as lace, his photographs tense with the moment without offering description, his collages gently jarring.

The “cloud-style” hanging flattens any hierarchy of value between works, conceived as elements of a wall decoration. The proliferating phrases, written in a variety of scripts evocative of Jean-Michel Basquiat or David Shrigley, confuse more than they clarify—a gift to viewers who ask for nothing else. Yet these schoolboy jokes hum with a quiet anxiety, expressing the impossibility of accepting an unequal and cynical society, as fascinated by luxury as it is by violence. He fills notebooks with ideas, annotations, observations—some take form immediately, others are matured over time, or remain as doodles. Whether or not they are realized doesn’t matter, so long as they contribute to a continuous flow in reaction to current events. Whether or not one agrees with them is of little importance, as long as a space for thought and appearance is created.

Among the ’68ers who shouted “under the cobblestones, the beach,” it became common to mock their own children—the so-called bof generation, followers of world culture, glued to screens. For the Love of Risk seems to naively reply: “under the spotlights, the cobblestones.”

Text by Sébastien Gokalp for the Salon de Montrouge, 2012
Translation: Triangle-Astérides