Gaspar Willmann

“When Gaspar Willmann, from the time that is his, and ours, reopens the question of reproduced and found images, their mediation and their circulation, he does so as a critical heir to the post-Internet movement whose corpse was left for dead the day after the 9th Berlin Biennale, in 2016. Times have changed, suffering bodies are reminded of the digital utopia that wanted to dissolve them, and eyes are opened to the structural inequalities endorsed by algorithmic rationality . If the artist, who graduated in 2019 from the Beaux-Arts de Lyon, poses as the heir of Seth Price and Artie Vierkant, it is nevertheless impossible for him to celebrate them: the “object images” of the second, which served as a manifesto ( The Image Object Post-Internet published on several sites) to post-Internet art, in 2010, operating a permanent back and forth between sculpture and its modified exhibition view, are depressing because they open the infinite abyss under our feet nothingness. During his first years of study, Willmann undertakes a job of painting which does not satisfy him: what interest, so much effort to reproduce what already exists, and which will only lead most of the time to its circulation. self-gratifying on social networks? He then opted for video in found footage... too smooth, too empty, before finding his tactic: parasitize each other to break the surface, smear the smooth, bring out the affect."

“Beyond the particular stories that Gaspar Willmann creates by recomposing them, it is a story of the circulation and transformation of images that he tells in his creative process. In his computer runs a photoshop file that manipulates a database like so many virtual stories, not so much in the common sense today of their digital existence but rather in the sense of their current or realized potential for existence. This virtual function of the images is precisely the one questioned by the subjectless figurations, activated by the artist in the video and by the viewer's imagination.

“La petite mort” thus designates both the technical dimension of the artist’s work, which brings a finished story to the canvas, and the intimate and emotional relationship that triggers this advent. The video and its painted correspondences then become so many subjective anchor points from which, by rapprochement or empathic detachment, we take the time to think about our own relationship to reality in a world in loss of truths."