Gilles Barbier (b. 1965)

An eerily lifelike banana skin lies discarded, browning and askew. Vaseline Onirique (2006), like Gilles Barbier’s recurring use of his own ageing likeness over twenty-five years and his famed series of elderly superheroes, seems to speak of the inevitable pathos of the passage of time. Through his conceptual practice, however, it becomes something of a talisman: in addition to the banana skin’s standard cartoonish, humorous connotations, it is also a key element in Barbier’s absurdist sculptural vocabulary. ‘Sliding,’ he says, ‘is an activity and a way of thinking that makes it possible to skirt contradictions and lubricate differences, not in order to produce closed syntheses, but so as to experience their extremities, the two ends, a space that cannot be broken down’ (G. Barbier quoted in P. Berckx, Un Abézédaire dans le désordre, Paris 2008). Vaseline Onirique translates as ‘Dreamlike Vaseline,’ emphasising this idea of lubrication: by embracing its material paradox and incongruity, the object slips the viewer into a new world of reverie and imaginative freedom.