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Gilles Teboul or painting as armed resistance Sacha Tarassoff

Gilles Teboul is one of those artists who have taken up the challenge of painting, even though its theoretical death was often proclaimed in the last century. Resisting the most recent endeavors to set him apart, particularly institutional ones, Gilles Teboul would like to offer pictorial proof of the persistance of painting from the inside.

In order to do so, he staunchly seeks to test its boundaries: through horizontal passageways which are a large number of furrows, almost mechanically repeated in the coats offering paradoxical blends of ivory black and titanium white, through numerous scrapings, subtractions of matter and shapes. His large canvases or his papers are the result of this erasure and they act as the revealer of this limit where painting resists. The place where all imagery becomes absent, all color neutralized – exclusive use of non colors –, all gestures eliminated, every canvas is a random state of painting in de-construction. These snapshots of painting have a carnal presence that Gilles Teboul, also a photographer, denies to photography which, even in its guise of art, still remains smooth, distant and aseptic, a prisoner of the limits of its own medium.

Moreover, when he takes photographs, it is once again in reference to painting in a metonymic way, by staging his painting tools in unexpected, abstract compositions, (the series on display at the Bruno Delarue Gallery in 2000) and ironically called, « Painting ».
Because all senses are mobilised, the painting of Gilles Teboul resists, producing an irreducible pleasure, even and especially when it is pushed to the extremes, to the limits of its own destruction.

Gilles Teboul is one of those artists who have taken up the challenge of painting, even though its theoretical death was often proclaimed in the last century. Resisting the most recent endeavors to set him apart, particularly institutional ones, Gilles Teboul would like to offer pictorial proof of the persistance of painting from the inside.

In order to do so, he staunchly seeks to test its boundaries: through horizontal passageways which are a large number of furrows, almost mechanically repeated in the coats offering paradoxical blends of ivory black and titanium white, through numerous scrapings, subtractions of matter and shapes. His large canvases or his papers are the result of this erasure and they act as the revealer of this limit where painting resists. The place where all imagery becomes absent, all color neutralized – exclusive use of non colors –, all gestures eliminated, every canvas is a random state of painting in de-construction. These snapshots of painting have a carnal presence that Gilles Teboul, also a photographer, denies to photography which, even in its guise of art, still remains smooth, distant and aseptic, a prisoner of the limits of its own medium.

Moreover, when he takes photographs, it is once again in reference to painting in a metonymic way, by staging his painting tools in unexpected, abstract compositions, (the series on display at the Bruno Delarue Gallery in 2000) and ironically called, « Painting ».
Because all senses are mobilised, the painting of Gilles Teboul resists, producing an irreducible pleasure, even and especially when it is pushed to the extremes, to the limits of its own destruction.