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Pierre was born in 1950 in La Roche-sur-Yon (France).
Gilles was born in 1953 in Le Havre (Fr).
Live and work in Paris.
Gallery website : www.denoirmont.com
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Dazzlement. That is just what the work of Pierre and Gilles, overflowing with superlative beauty, has consistently offered us for thirty years now (Iggy Pop, 1977). But not only that.
Borrowing from popular aesthetics its taste for alluring visual formulas, Pierre and Gilles' archetypal image - an arranged portrait - is also characterized by a Protean excess, ambiguous on purpose. There is certainly beauty of composition, but accompanied by a deliberately exaggerated staging. There is most refined color work, but again in an exaggerated manner. There is an extremely accurate rendering but also a beautifying smoothing, kitsch to the extreme, a tad shady. The models, whose first names are used in the work title but nevertheless torn from their real identities by a clothing transfiguration and by a mode of presentation that makes them emblems rather than human figures.
From the early days of their collaboration in 1976, Peter has done the shooting and Gilles the painting. [...] Pierre and Gilles, partners in their private lives, are also linked by the work of art, a consecration of an emotional bond that is in their case in symbiosis with an aesthetic bond. "For them, the art creation process is a long and complex path. Together they first imagine the creative idea, then draw the preliminary sketches, and then look for the ideal model. Gilles then looks for the elements to create the decor, and Peter takes the photos. Once the photo has been selected and printed, Gilles repaints the image. Finally they create a frame specific to the work. Since the photo is painted by hand, no other copy can be made."*
Photography and painting are entwined in the work of Pierre and Gilles: they are an expression of the concrete union of two artists and a synthesis of their reciprocal talents. [...] A medium par excellence of recording, photography now sees itself re-materialized in the medium of the painting. This retouching by paint, a physical act if there ever was one, an act involving bodily gesture, ensures the uniqueness of each "photo-painting," through its handicraft characteristics and by extension its symbolic added value in the era of the triumphant "mechanical reproduction" of images as described by Walter Benjamin. It is also an act that allows the transubstantiation of the image to take place. The latter thereby ceases to be a document and becomes a painting.
Excerpts from Paul Ardenne's Pierre et Gilles, Double je, 1976-2007 Tashen, Cologne, 2007
* Oscar Ho Hing-Kay, "Le plaisir populaire de Pierre et Gilles", Pierre et Gilles rétrospective, MOCA, Shanghai, 2005
Pierre was born in La Roche-sur-Yon in 1950, Gilles in Le Havre in 1953.
In the early 1970s, Gilles obtained his degree from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre, while Pierre studied photography in Geneva. They met in 1976 and began working together in 1977.
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