TOULOUSE, FRANCE.- Galerie Sollertis will present The pretty girl ... and the bad boy, Katia Bourdarel / Gilles Barbier, on view from March, 12 to April, 19 2008. Katia Bourdarel - In Katia Bourdarel’s world the image of herself proliferates. Photographed, embroidered, drawn, painted or animated, it is omnipresent. Eve or Pandora, the subject-author of these images makes the icon of female narcissism sparkle, upsetting the codes. When she takes up the pin-up theme, filling her drawings with spiritual message, she addresses quirky subtitles to the eyes about what it is looking at. The oxymoron reaches its climax with sublime humor. No invitation to the depth on these smooth icons, everything is tense on the surface, everything is playing, but then the embroidery attacks the surface, the narration threatens the image. The text distraughts. Dizziness and vertigo again in her paintings of little girls, no text here but a strange feeling going to disrupt the surface, to spoil the appearance. Portraits of teenager playing with her reflect like she would play with her doll. Masquerade, disguise, staging the play, she invents stories for herself, does the casting with roles of princesses, big girls, pretty girls. This world is inhabited by moments of happiness suspended. But it is also parasitized by Une Chanson douce. A little hypnotic music drags us to an eroticized vision of the body. The alternating vision of man and woman into the love repeats visually the scansion of the rotornello. The acephalous couple, lost in its pleasures, goes unwittingly with the repetition of a musical motif announcing a singing which will never come. Between misleading appearances and ambivalent situations, Katia Bourdarel likes to sink the audience in an almost unidentifiable embarrassment.

Gilles Barbier - Gilles Barbier’s work develops a world haunted by science fiction and comics trip. He enriches his work with reading cultivating the contemporary thoughts that conceal history of art, literature, philosophy and sciences. “ I write a lot because it’s a way for me to slow the mind flow sometimes a bit delirious, and try by strategies sometimes a bit paranoiac, to take the sense to the limit. Writing is a tool very practical which organize the things better than language. My texts production prefigures many of piece. I have often a feeling that my pieces are illustrations of these texts. This work method dominated bit by bit. When I show a piece, its preceding work is not visible. [...] It pose a real problem because what lead to the exhibition area is only a fragment of what pre-exists : a very narrative pretext, divided and also wrote.” Creator of absurd and complex fictions, master of mental rebus, Gilles Barbier is an atypical artist who cultivates the ambiguity between a “stupid”, derisory and comical attitude, and an “inventor genius, who, by the absurdity, shows the no sense of our society.”