Christian Barbier

Self-taught artist Christian Barber was born in 1971 in the Var. The human faces that he paints areactually sculptures on canvas. The human shows a face completely inhabited by humanity. The skin is a veil to raise, like so many others.

These beings stare at us, puzzled, their gaze clinging to the one of the viewer and does the leave it anymore. The appearance, depending on its deformity, its conformity and its aesthetics aroused reactions of rejection or attraction, of cooperation or avoidance, friendship or hostility, integration or social discrimination: "The face is our appearance, but not the essence. "

Christian Barbier acts as an archaeologist who digs in the strata of the field to find debris from the past; he proceeded to covering things, erase, layer, while leaving a significant role to the impulse and the spontaneity of the gesture.

This enables him to make space to the unpredictable and gradually identify images coming from the depths of his memory. Then he uses shreds and fibers, fragments of memories that overlap and intertwine.

With his brushes, spatulas or knives, he applies, glues and coats with his raw material successive layers in order to achieve a palpable, physical thickness that expresses with intensity the inner weight of feelings and the mask of appearances.

The wounds in the flesh revealed by the thick material on the canvas bring us to put ourselves into question and take us to our own reality without any misrepresentation or artifice.

Christian Barbier isn't searching for the aesthetic look the but rather attempting to question us concerning the most valuable thing that we have in us, the vital spark that rekindles hope.