En coulisse – Gilles Miquelis
Exhibition
From 22 February to 05 April 2025
In this new exhibition, Gilles Miquelis blurs the boundaries between the scabrous and the poetic. These scenes of daily life, marked by romantic tensions, are transformed into paintings where humor rubs shoulders with a palpable unease.
A 2001 graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montpellier, Gilles Miquelis paints in oil, in large format, on canvases that sometimes unfold in diptychs, or on small formats, on tracing paper or rhodoids. After a work of composition, his gesture is rapid in the realization, he constructs his paintings like snapshots. The artist, behind a very precise style, paints an offbeat and caustic portrait of the present time. His works are part of several public collections, notably that of the MAMAC (Nice). In 2023, he participated in Immortelle, an exhibition dedicated to young French figurative painting at the MO.CO (Montpellier).
The visual references borrowed from magazines such as Cinémonde dialogue with striking pictorial compositions. Each work acts as a mirror held up to the viewer, placing him in an ambivalent posture of voyeur and witness.
From fragments of love stories in the intimacy of a marital bedroom, to burlesque scenes in the middle of the street – like a clumsy lover hanging from a window getting bitten by a dog (the husband’s?) – each painting distils a part of humanity, sometimes touching, sometimes grating.
At the crossroads of humor and latent violence, Gilles Miquelis delivers a fresco of the contemporary human condition, where the “girl next door” becomes a movie heroine, where exchanges of glances reveal hidden truths, and where each canvas is a scene from a film of everyday life.