Benoit Barbagli

Benoît Barbagli's workshop is vast. Ocean river mountain are its performative spaces. Art emerges there, a vital emergence within the collective. His plural and multi-mediumistic proposals hatch in itinerant gestures. Benoît Barbagli moves art into nature.

In his peripatetic devices, the path makes sense, the nudity is candid, and art manifests itself in appearances. The configurations are multiple, the rituals varied and, often, the expedition that leads to the artistic experience is done with plastic surgeons. His camera is described as a "steering wheel", it passes from hand to hand and the signature is frequently shared or collective.

Benoît Barbagli explores borders. He draws on the substrate of creation in search of its germinations from shared food. The Mountain creates as much as the sea, as the artist friend, by its presence, by its movement, by the principle of life, which is in essence random, which moves it. Art captures moments of the Living which always manifests itself where we do not expect it, in incredible sequences that we sometimes struggle to capture in their deployments. With humor, lightness, strength and delicacy, Barbagli invites us to take a bite of the moments and encourages us to consider them in the ephemeral beauty they display. An ode to Vitality.

The four elements are recurrent. They animate and structure the artist's series in Heraclitean outbursts. Fire, water, air, earth. The universe of Benoît Barbagli is poetic, polysemous, modest, funny. He likes to "divert the references of culture to return them to nature. What is it that works? The project ? Its manifestations? He orchestrates meetings, a community is created around the project and the creative space becomes a joyous pretext for life.

To pay homage to the living, to restore its place, the artist disappears, he stages, stages himself and yet fades with great elegance, the ego dissolves in the interconnected, I is another. Benoît Barbagli is reverse romanticism. His return to nature takes place in a peaceful setting where egotism is annihilated, where praise loses its pomp, where art emerges in its simplest expression.

A body dives into the Mediterranean sea in winter and holds out a bouquet in the icy water, the fertile sea is also deadly lately. Eros and Thanatos come together, loving ardor and mortuary homage are two sides of the same mirror. In a love attempt with a torch, a body throws itself off a cliff, the diver's tomb or inextinguishable passion? The moment is in abeyance, an unresolved space subjected to the projections of the spectator. Grace, drop and bounce - or not, are part of the whole thing.

Benoît Barbagli is the sherpa of the mountain, he carries his paintings there for the latter to create. It takes the museification away from the female body by returning it to the earth. He captures the spark igniting the beam. He walks through the Anthropocene by questioning the stars, born of chaos.