Fabien Gilles

FABIEN GILLES ® generic brand To understand why Fabien Gilles draws generic extracts by inserting his name everywhere, it is useful to consider his work with a little hindsight. The glorification of “Fabien Gilles” - which is his real name - is indeed the exclusive and admirable object of his production. By using his surname, Fabien mischievously confuses, in his work, reality and fantasized life. For more than ten years, he has been making creative proofs of his mythology as a genius artist. It must be recognized that this exercise may seem pretentious and that it would be very nauseating if it were the work of an ambitious egocentric. But it is not. It is a modest and inspired spirit who imagined this great self-apology and his works make the assumed choice of the economy of means. At a time when branding is invading all fields of society, the dream life of Fabien Gilles is that of a hero artist, a media and romantic cultural icon, who readily takes the form of a logo, a brand , of an empire… Fabien is interested in superficial proofs of notoriety, which are most often expressed in the form of graphic charters: they are external signs of celebrity, which glorify the form by ostensibly abandoning the substance. Why create a whole film when all he has to do is draw the poster or extract the most significant shot (the one with his name) to let it be understood that his work existed? The cinema is the universe of the show and the fable, it lends itself particularly well to this approach: of all the arts, the 7th is indeed the most popular (Fabien Gilles loves popularity), and of all the arts. creators, the director is the one who comes closest to a demiurge, reigning supreme over a universe straight out of his imagination. The Credits series also pays tribute to a certain cinema: this cinema of the past, tinkered with, artisanal, where modesty of means was not perceived as an obstacle to artistic ambitions. The Generics assume their deception. They have an intrinsically absurd side since they only represent an extract of an initially sequential form. Freeing himself from the smooth perfection of animation, Fabien Gilles does not hide his gesture, the touch of his brush or the vibration of his black stone either. But despite their outdated style, these works raise the highly contemporary question of disinformation. The images illustrating these Generics are also taken from social networks where everyone tries to create a mythology - a bit like Fabien Gilles - and where everyone practices, more or less consciously, intoxication by images ... just like Fabien Gilles. Frank Puaux