While graduating from the Boulle school in 2011, GilGil discovered the technique of marquetry, which, according to her teacher Alain Noret, is a discipline in which the only limits encountered are those of the artist’s imagination. This is why she will continue to train in her workshop in Fontainebleau for a year in addition to her main activity.
GilGil has also been practicing photography for 15 years as well as drawing since adolescence, until the workshops in Paris a few years later in the portrait / nudes section.
It is from this association, the liveliness of the photographic image frozen in time, the technique of drawing – slower – and the work of wood, a material that the artist can abuse endlessly, that was born its artistic line.
The direction of her work is the flight of time, this red and elastic thread to which we are all clinging. Her characters are petrified somewhere in this space-time and it is by decontextualizing them, by freezing them in the panels that GilGil tries to materialize a certain absurdity of existence. The cancellation of the depth of field allows him to fracture reality in order to rearrange it.
The artist likes to disguise the material in a palimpsest way, leaving visible the traces of the genesis of the work to re-register the viewer in another time, another reality.
“There is no difference in essence between artist and craftsman. The artist is only an inspired craftsman.”
Walter Gropius – Bauhaus 1919
“Beach stories” therefore appears as an exhibition at the confluence of GilGil’s different passions. Bare bodies, always excellent light, the beach is the right place to provide the raw material for the artist, who then has an infinite choice of compositions, like the overexposed beach series by Massimo Vitali.