French artist Brice Guilbert draws on his Creole roots, meditating on memories of home through his lyrical volcanic paintings and narrative music.
Read MoreGuilbert was born in 1979 in Montpellier, France. He grew up on Réunion Island off the coast of Madagascar, in the town of Saint-Joseph. Here he would daydream about eruptions from Piton de la Fournaise, an enormous active volcano that neighboured his childhood home. The volcano's presence would be seen in much of his later work.
The artist studied drawing at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre, Brussels (1997–2003), and was a drawing assistant at the same school from 2005 to 2011. He is also a prolific musician, releasing six albums between 2005 and 2019. Guilbert now lives and works in Brussels, although he makes a yearly pilgrimage back to Réunion.
Despite their dense materiality, Brice Guilbert's paintings also have a lightness that exudes from their softly-toned surfaces.
Working in video, installation, drawing, music and painting, Guilbert's earlier practice focused on pure geometry with a minimal palette.
Since around 2016, his began to repeatedly paint the same view of the volcano that backgrounded his childhood home. The representations of Piton de la Fournaise are iterated in a variety of colours and scales and on different supports. He initially painted on torn pages from Le Dessin Français au XIXe Siècle, an anthology of French 19th century painters.
In his Fournez series (2021) (the local name for Piton de la Fournaise), Guilbert's use of colour takes on the hazy technicolour quality of Monet's palette. Dense impasto strokes radiate from a shadowy volcanic tip, with the volcano's eruption transformed into an abstracted burst of light. The ambiguity of Guilbert's imagery is built through accumulated layers of gestures and materials. He paints with a heat gun and homemade oil bars, warming the hard paint to a more malleable texture. These densely packed, radiant marks mirror the process of magma seeping through fissures, before hardening into basalt striations.
These volcano paintings are often presented with Guilbert's music and video works, collectively attempting to capture memories of the volcanic landscapes of his childhood. Guilbert likens these meditative repetitions to his musical practice, applying paint as if he were 'strumming chords in a long melody'.
The artist's music is also impacted by his roots, with his album Firinga (2015) appropriating the traditional maloya style of folk music on Réunion Island. Atmospheric guitar and soft vocals create a hazy, ambient sound that works in dialogue with Guilbert's similarly obscure paintings, echoing a nostalgic yet imperfect reminiscence of home.
Brice Guilbert has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
Select solo exhibitions include Sang Dragons, ADZ Gallery, Lisbon (2021); Mendes Wood DM, Villa Era, Vigliano Biellese (2020); Letchis, TÉAT Champ Fleuri, Sainte-Clotilde, Réunion (2019); Ti Robinson, Royal, Brussels (2019); Piton diab, Island, Brussels (2016); Domino, Théâtre National, Brussels (2015); and Fantôme / Levier / Obstacle, Galerie Hunchentoot, Berlin (2012).
Select group exhibitions include Silence, Pace Gallery, Geneva (2021); FUNKA, with Takuro Kuwata, Siegfried Contemporary, London (2021); Je connais des îles lointaines, Droom, Marseille (2019); Elements, Rotonde, Brussels (2017); Dalonaz & Dalonaz II, Royal, Brussels (2017); Napoli, with Sarah Caillard, Corrida, Ghent (2016); Friendly Faces, Johannes Vogt, New York (2015); and Black Market, with Harold Ancart, Galerie Hunchentoot, Berlin (2009–10).
Brice Guilbert's website can be found here and his Instagram can be found here.
Peter Derksen | Ocula | 2022
