“To follow love, is to start out on a road that leaves us more vulnerable and more real, love causes us to forget ourselves and trust to its mysteries.” Pierre et Gilles

From September 24 to the November 18, Pierre et Gilles will present their new works in an exhibition entitled Le Grand Amour. More than ever love remains the artists’ main leitmotiv. Under the half-angelic, half-demonic gaze of the young Amour taillant son arc (Love carving his bow), Love is present in most of the works on display.

The passionate love of a couple as unconventional as Marilyn Manson and Dita von Teese in Le Grand Amour (The Great Love); divine love in La Révélation; the male desire of the Dark Room’s visitor; the love of freedom in L’Aveu (The Admission)... Each work by Pierre et Gilles, more than just a portrait, is a history, a scenario, a story in embryo. Their works have a cinematic quality because they tell stories, inventing a type of instant narrative based on a wealth of detail and sophistication never lacking in poetry. This cinematic art is more than ever at the center of their art as shown by the works they produced with Dita von Teese, in which she slips into the skin of James Elroy’s Dahlia Noir (The Black Dahlia) or with L’escale (The Stopover) which combines in two pictures the improbable meeting between the Blue Angel and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. And it does this without hinting at the thunderous irruption of such strong personalities through their singularity, their exuberance and their very life, already heroes of the cinema.

For more than 28 years, Pierre et Gilles have managed to influence our collective imagination with their immediately identifiable style. Indeed, they continue to display this implacable insistence on perfection, which makes them capable of producing images of prodigious complexity without ever having to resort to using computer techniques. Retouching enables photography to get closer to the truth, by making it conform to a pre-established reality. In a time when computer generated images are the norm, Pierre et Gilles remain more than ever faithful to this traditional technique. “It’s much more interesting to work in this way, the image is more alive, and has more depth because of the this handmade and organic process”.

The Exils Intérieurs (Internal Exiles) is a series of self-portraits which is a radical departure from the rest of their work and for them is the opportunity to experiment with a totally new manner of representing the human body. Bodies, not immediately identifiable as such, are diffracted, split up, as though deconstructed by the prism of a distorting mirror, sometimes to the extent that they reach a point of unexpected abstraction. Less innocent, more tormented, these images exert an immediate fascination. Its profound complexity, the aura of fantastic mystery and trouble are still further emphasized by the choice of titles, originating for the most part from the Velvet Underground, to which Exil Intérieur could be the most perfect visual response.

The field opened by Le Grand Amour is so vast that you can only let your imagination wander; we are invited on a journey, a dream, to reflect. Pierre et Gilles propel us with all the grace and intelligence at their command.