A bird, a child, a goat,
The blue of the sky, a beautiful half-hearted smile,
A crocodile, a hell of a sun,
And this I fall asleep in wonderfuland.

... I do as I like,
Since that is how I imagine a perfect world.

Excerpt from the song "Un monde Parfait" (A perfect world) sung by Ilona)

In the preface to his Dictionnaire des Idées reçues (Dictionary of Accepted Ideas) Gustave Flaubert gives a nomenclature of mental objects that encumbered his time. He presents them in a jumble and we don’t know what to make of them - the statements are indecidable and only the author’s humor and cruel objectivity tell us that he is no dupe in these odds and ends without visible structure. No direct judgement, everything is very ambiguous and quoted. A long time before Marcel Duchamp, for whom it is the looker who makes the painting, here it is the reader who makes the book.
An inventory of our period, which is just as “indecidable” and disjointed, is grouped in the series of works created by Pierre et Gilles these last two years and presented at the gallery from November 10, 2006 to January 10, 2007. Admirers will find the recurrent and obsessive themes that they know well but it is, above all, the way of seeing the images and presenting them that, once again, characterizes this series.
No programmed continuous theme, but a style. All sources can be called on: low culture, high culture and the lack of culture could also meet the bill. Often these works are « images of images », emotions linked to the memory of a mental, painted or printed image – it does not matter… Only its invocation and reappearance in the “Pierre et Gilles ritual” is what is expressed. Nothing is implied, no message, this principle can be applied to any image.
This ritual takes form through chance encounters. It starts with a scripted dream focusing on a face or an accepted idea. Then there are the sketches, a vague drawing, then the thought that materializes with the construction of decors and the search for characters. During the process an event occurs that takes the project into another direction. This chance element feeds the work. One day, finally, a precarious installation is built in the cellar/studio. The actors perform the play or improvise, playing their own role or that of a collective phantasm. No spectator other than the camera. The photographs are widely corrected when developed and the project is overhauled again, the image, as it leaves its digital silvery bath, becomes clearer and the painting can then begin and give new surprises. Many versions and repentances blend into the image that only slowly emerges with difficulty from the emptiness of inert material.
Once the image is finished it must be framed. After the script, the scenery, the photograph and the painting, it is the volume and the architecture of the frame that will finalize the work. It is a closely bonded art that integrates numerous complementary practices.
With Pierre et Gilles everything is ritualized and could appear unchanging. But, in the end, what must prevail is the painted image that can but lead to the “indecidable”.