Gerald Petit wove together this exhibition at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, using figures split in several pieces, cracked (the effect of a relationship breaking up), sucked in by the fascinating power of myth or duplicated several times.
His work with photographs and paintings consists in an attempt to reassemble them at the same time as their decomposition is accepted and exhibited. The role assumed by the artist, then, is to capture both aspects at once, every time—what people aim for and cannot reach, those who seduce them and those who would rather flee. And then, this: subjects and their own image, the image and its medium, the medium and its history, the character and its double. Everything irreconcilably divided, cracking up, including the relation of the painter (or photographer) to the model. And accordingly, everything the artist seeks to intercede in, then tries to make a work out of this very intercession. Finally, from moments of grace (of flirt) to crepuscular moments when the charm is altered, the exhibition also unabashedly displays a fetishistic, padded side, its relation to the fragment and to love, in the manner of « A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments ».
Judicaël Lavrador