While awaiting his installation as a member of the Institute at the Academy of Fine Arts, Philippe Garel felt the need to remember his work, to take a retrospective look at what it was: to make an inventory of it. Grasping a pencil on long sheets of paper he laid down almost everything that, from 1972 to today, has been the scattered elements of his work. This long drawing of more than 20 meters he entitled it: Picturesque inventory. If the adjective picturesque is understood as that which surprises by its unusual aspect or its foreign flavor, it refers in its old acceptance to: "what belongs to painting". From the beginning and always intersect objects, sculptures and painting. But the drawing is at the origin of everything. Drawing, not as a technique used to make images but as an essential discipline, a relationship of complicity with the world, the exterior of oneself. Insofar as Philippe Garel's design can be recognized by incomparable mastery, it asserts itself above all as proof of a world. A world that exists at the same time as it is invented. Never moral, always ironic, relevant and tasty, implausible objects giving rise to a smile, slippers or aquatic fins with heels… Or more serious, like the threatening expansion of the curls of a cabbage that has become an atomic threat. By looking at his work, by repeating it by drawing, he affirms the continuity of his spirit, the permanence of a relevant look at things. Even is a vital act and as he watches, pencil in hand, all he has produced is more than a drawing he makes. This one is 20 meters, he says a life of work, he is the object of the book presented at 39 rue Volta, at the Area gallery at a place called: "This strange idea of the beautiful". Metro Arts et Métiers Telephone: 01 45 23 31 52 - 01 42 22 29 02