“Nuit Électrique” Highlights Pierre et Gilles’ Flamboyant Work at Galerie Templon
With “Nuit électrique”, their latest exhibition held at Templon Paris, artist duo Pierre et Gilles embrace their longstanding career and their role as contemporary portraitists and pioneers of LGBTQIA+ activism. Internationally renowned, Pierre et Gilles have been developing a four-handed artistic practice since 1976. Their paintings portray the duo’s loved ones, both anonymous and famous, amidst sophisticated life-size settings created in their studios. Once the photograph has been printed on the canvas, a meticulous painting technique comes into play. These image-makers have developed a unique iconography that explores the boundaries between art history and popular culture.
With these new paintings, created during the past two years, the artists play around their own iconicity to create a series of dark, whimsical portraits. The duo presents us here with some of their favourite characters, such as sailors, angels, hoodlums and hooligans. Whether nude or fully tattooed, portrayed as couples in love or disillusioned loners, their characters make quite an enticing, joyful and vaguely disturbing crowd. Playing on the ambiguity of their registers, Pierre et Gilles embrace their creative universe with humour to sketch out a troubled world, which oscillates between optimism and disillusionment. One of the most radical aspects of their recent work is the use of raw, artificial lighting, which transfigures the features of the figures. It can be read as a powerful metaphor for resistance to the passage of time, which levels out everything – lives and struggles.
During the exhibition opening held at Galerie Templon, we had the pleasure of meeting the duo, alongside Djemila Khelifa, Eva Ionesco, Thomas Baigneres, Arielle Dombasle, Jean-Michel Othoniel et Johan Creten, and Elli Medeiros.
Photo : Ayka Lux
