In the era of virtual images, Gilbert Garcin puts together his little vignettes with nothing at all, glue, scissors, a few scraps. With in-jokes and puns one after another, you could say that he’s having fun, but it’s just the opposite : he’s playing a role. Because Garcin is the subject and the object of his own images. Could this detour via himself be a continual process of soul-searching?

Travestying himself in an omnipresent character, cooking up unbelievable adventures for himself in surrealistic decors, the incorrigible little man keeps laughing at himself. The photograph becomes “the image that I’m the hero of”, multiplying the episodes of an incessantly reinvented comic illusion. In this self-portrait in the form of simulacra, the photographer looks at the photographer who is perhaps pretending to be a photographer…

Yves Gerbal