Pierre et Gilles
Rencontre avec Pierre et Gilles
In their exhibition, Electric Night, at Galerie Templon, Pierre et Gilles revisit their memories of the mythical Le Palace nightclub. A new generation of night owls – from a bruise-faced sailor to partying models and porn stars – are captured against brightly lit nocturnal backgrounds.
Pierre et Gilles, the pseudonym of Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, born in 1950 and 1953 respectively, began collaborating in their twenties. They make theatrically staged portraits combining photography and painting in the basement studio of their home in Pré Saint Gervais, northeast of Paris. Ideas about pop culture, LGBTIQA+ rights, and art history intermingle in unique works depicting stars and anonymous individuals alike.
« Creation is a journey. We give ourselves a direction but we need to be surprised by what we make »
You started collaborating at the end of the 1970s. Tell us about your early days.
At the start, we made quite pop things – portraits with colourful backgrounds because we lived in a small apartment. We made a collection of photos in photo booths. Gradually we began staging our images and putting in flowers. When we moved to a larger apartment in Bastille and worked for the magazine Façade, similar to Warhol’s Interview, we made our first images with Iggy Pop. We’ve always photographed our friends, known or unknown – it’s the same for us. It’s like a large family; everybody in our photos spends an afternoon with us. There’s a lot of humanity in our relationship with people.
Can you talk a bit about your creative process to make your unique works?
We’re complementary. We each have our role and we discuss everything together. We do a lot of work in advance; the décor takes a long time to make – between three days and over a week. We try to be surprised by what will happen when the model arrives. It’s quite difficult to pose for Pierre et Gilles: it’s very precise and the expression needs to be natural – a bit like studio painting in bygone days. For the last 10 years, we’ve been working with digital photography and we print on canvas. Painting the images takes around at least two weeks. Our works are modern paintings of our era but with classicism.
What comes first, the character or the theme?
It’s often the character [connected to] the theme on our mind. It’s as if we dress the character in a made-to-measure way. If the model doesn’t come, it’s a big problem because we can’t find somebody else to replace them. We’d have to rework the décor in another way which has already happened.
Your works were once projected onto the walls of Le Palace nightclub. You’ve drawn inspiration from that era to make your new series Electric Night. Could you tell us about the ideas behind it?
How did you conceive the set design for the images?
We wanted something very festive, a bit raw and fluorescent. We bought a lot of fairy lights and bulbs at Christmas time and ordered plastic neons from China. Previously, we used flowers and plants around the body; this time we did it with electrical elements.
Did you look at archived photos of Le Palace?
No, it’s a work on memory. Each model inspires something different in us. For example, there’s Lukas Ionesco, Eva Ionesco’s son, and the model Nassim Guizani [Over the Rainbow (Nassim Guizani et Lukas Ionesco), 2023] and [trans porn actress] Allanah Starr. They’re personalities of the night today.
Tell us about the work U=U featuring Yassin Chekkouh with floral letters around his legs and a dartboard in his hand.
It’s a guy we like a lot who’s HIV positive, an activist who’s very involved in the fight against serophobia. Now if you’re HIV positive, it’s as if you’re normal; thanks to the treatment, there’s no need to worry. But we struggled figuring out how to express it. We’d started working with a different idea which we abandoned. A few months later, after reflecting, we found another way of doing it.
Over the decades, you’ve received a lot of letters from the gay community. What can you tell us about that?
We’ve brought a lot to the gay community. From every country, including China, we’ve received mail with young people saying that our images helped them come out and accept themselves because they gave a positive image of homosexuality. Really, it’s been a nice present for us.
There are also numerous references to religion, such as to Saint Sebastian, in your work.
Religion is something we’d rejected and that we rediscovered after a trip to a catholic part of southern India. We were very surprised to see small, colourful, naive statues of Saint Sebastian in the villages. This gave us the idea of expressing the saints with our personal vision. Even U=U has a St Sebastian side to it.
Your self-portrait Vive La Retraite depicts you on holiday as retirees. Were you reflecting on the demonstrations against the retirement age reforms?
We’re in France where people shout from every corner. This made us want to make a funny image about retirement. We like doing things that make people smile and wanted to stage ourselves in a humorous image like 1970s postcards.
You’ve also a made a portrait of Isabelle Huppert as Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, in reference to her role in Robert Wilson’s production, Mary Said What She Said, at the Théâtre de la Ville de Paris last year. How did it come about?
She invited us to come and see the play and afterwards we went and chatted in her dressing room. She wanted us to make an image and so did we; we used the beautiful costume from the play and invented the décor. It’s the third time that we’ve worked together. It was fantastic; she’s a perfectionist down to the smallest detail who loves photography and posing and always takes things further.
What’s changed for you during the last few decades in terms of how your work is received?
There was more [creative] freedom before. You gain some things and lose others. People want things to be correct now.
On the subject of gaining, you openly supported the idea of gay marriage with your work, Les Mariés (1992).
We’re married now! We got married not long ago at the town hall. It wasn’t our dream when we were young in the era of sexual freedom, before AIDS.
What ideas are you exploring now after Electric Night?
Nudity in quite natural decors and a return to our beginnings, like Adam et Eve [Eva Ionesco et Kévin Luzac, 1981]. We want to really work on the body now because we don’t see it really any more in the fairs everywhere even though it’s in the history of art. Creation is a journey. We give ourselves a direction but we need to be surprised by what we make. Life should be full of surprises; it’d be too sad if everything were planned in advance.
Interview by Anna Sansom
Photos: Ayka Lux
