La vie c'est bizarre, je le vois sur mes ami.e.s
Adam Bilardi, Thomas Cap de Ville, Antoine Donzeaud, Cecilia Granara, Lisa Signorini, Gaspar Willmann
Exo Exo, Paris
December 9, 2021 – January 8, 2022
preview
La vie c'est bizarre, je le vois sur mes ami.e.s, 2021
Exhibition view, Exo Exo, Paris
Adam Bilardi,
Ton propre fardeau, 2021
Oil on canvas
130 x 81 cm
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Thomas Cap de Ville,
Livre 7, 2020
Housse de couette polyester, tissu, carton, papier, tirages photographiques, polaroids,
scotch, colle néoprène, agrafes, métal, fleurs séchées, insectes
Dimensions Variables
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Antoine Donzeaud,
Salut tristesse 2, 2021
Oil on wood
24 x 19 cm
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Cecilia Granara,
Soulagement II, 2021
Ink and oil on canvas
14 x 18 cm
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Lisa Signorini,
All games come with a prize, 2021
Mixed media on satiné wood
25 x 25 cm
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Gaspar Willmann,
JUMAP (la mandarine), 2021
Inkjet print and oil on canvas mounted on wood
39,5 x 26 cm
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La vie c’est bizarre, je le vois sur mes ami.e.s 1
It is October 2021. Antoine tells me about Adam’s work, which he discovered in an exhibition his friend Emma organized some time ago. «You’re going to love it, come on let’s go see it.» Adam seems reserved and I wonder how he’s going to talk to us about his paintings, if he’s even going to talk to us about his paintings. I see that there are often two figures in his work and I immediately tell myself that it must be about love or friendship. He tells us that when he was in school he painted men, and very quickly he got the impression that he was expected to be making so called “gay painting». So to avoid being labeled, he started painting dogs.
Regardless of the subject, really what counts is embracing each other.
A few days later, I tell Cecilia about our meeting with Adam and I show her his dogs, this metaphor for relationships that obsesses me a bit. I realize that in fact, we’re all trying to talk about this. What binds us, what separates us. Birth, metamorphosis,separation, death. All of these stages ate looping in Cecilia’s paintings, to the point of dizziness or ecstasy. And it was also to talk about these connections, no doubt, that Lisa started carving hearts out of wood to provide refuge for her stories. Finally, this is what Thomas compiles in his notebooks, which are increasingly deployed on a human scale: pieces of life that speak of the heart, but also of the guts, caught between the folds of pages.
We say we have the friends we deserve. I believe that we also have those who inspire us. Gaspar’s empathy for the figure of the loser, for the somewhat pathetic vestiges of what we consume or more generally of what we hide from ourselves, is the same as Antoine’s empathy for those who erect their sadness into sad smiley faces , cry on social networks and share it with as many people as possible. As if the universality of tears could console them. As if the anonymity of others could fix them. Sometimes we are more attached to what is far from us.
And attachment is also between us, through what we produce, through the way in which we find ourselves in what we make. Me crushing on Cecilia’s ‘Crying in the Chiottes’, Cecilia who adores Gaspar’s ‘JUMAP (butterfly of light)’ for the butterfly hiding there in the middle of the waste, Antoine who wants the crown in Adam’s ‘‘Charo’ because it’s ‘Before the ghosting, before the heart breaks’. 2
– Elisa Rigoulet, translation Cecilia Granara
1 From the song ‘Le Parfum des Filles’ by Timothée Joly
2 Title of a painting by Adam Bilardi, 2021
