Gilbert Garcin

Tout Peut Arriver
Anything Could Happen

At the age of 65, Gilbert Garcin retired from his lamp-making business in Marseille and took up photography. Now nearly 80, he has published five books, his work has been shown in dozens of exhibitions in France and abroad and his photographs are in prestigious private and public collections. Drawing on his lifetime of memories, Garcin’s surreal images in black and white catalogue the absurdity of the human condition. In these photomontages, where Garcin himself appears as his fictional ‘Mr Everyone’, it is the idea that makes the work, while photography simply records it. Yet the aesthetic created is still a very powerful one. ‘I always start with a correspondence between reality and an abstraction. It’s all grist to the mill: clouds in the sky, an expression in a book, a myth, a scene in the Vieux Port [old harbour]... Afterwards, it’s a matter of mood. It flows naturally, like automatic writing.’ While there is no possible pigeon-hole, observers will note cultural references ranging from Magritte to Monsieur Hulot. There is also a little bit of Sophie Calle in Gilbert Garcin; he shares with that contemporary artist a concern with tending to oneself and for others by making works out of tiny stories that recycle personal defeats and failures.